What are the best recruiting metrics to predict your future hiring needs?

Time to fill is important, but so is Time to Start. Your starting and onboarding process is just as important as your recruiting process. Once a candidate accepts an offer they should also have an understanding of how long the onboarding will take and what will be required. Loosing a candidate after they accept is no good. Data can be used to help track each step of the process up to Day 1 start.

In my experience time to fill is the go to for working backwards from a businesses hiring needs at the highest level. The challenge with time to fill is that is varies widely based on location, seniority, type of role and is heavily driven by factors outside of recruiting control. It’s a starting point to share with your partners when they need roles open by to achieve the desired start timeline. Talent market availability is key to understanding and driving what hiring to focus on in certain geographical locations. It’ll also give you a sense as to how quickly you can build a healthy pipeline and whether it can be sustained for repeat hiring. Lastly, look at time in stage to identify potential bottleneck areas and address those directly.

Quality of hire becomes one important metric to gauge if the right selection was made and whether it has produced results. It can be done quarterly to understand how new hires are progressing and able to yield results. This may also help to refine the pipeline created and as mentioned identify best source and assessment process.

A candidate pipeline, or talent community can be a really effective way to reduce time to hire, and improve overall candidate quality. Too often hiring is way too reactive; we focus on what we need right now (or yesterday), and hire for the immediate need, pausing our consideration of the market once we find the right candidate. I prefer a forward-thinking approach; as a business / recruiter always being aware of the talent coming on the market, and seeking to build relationships with future potential candidates. Through engaging with candidates that fit your general requirements ahead of time, you can build a talent community of relevant profiles and start your next hiring cycle with a running start.

In my experience, having a two pronged systematic talent approach is key to current and future success. In most organizations, there will be a certain subset of roles that are predictable in nature, whether that is the title, level, location or all of the above. For those, having a nurture campaign and backend talent pools of talent at the ready makes the turnaround time from role open to fill much quicker. It also changes the starting place for high volume roles (proactive vs. reactive). Having pools also allows you to be prepared for more niche executive or specialized roles. Helps with diversity hiring as well.

At times, unreasonable assessments/budgets/fancy skills sets become a roadblock in attracting the right talent in a given time. A collaborative approach with hiring managers with realistic expectations and agreed parameters saves on recruiting time.

Creating a positive candidate experience is an incredibly effective way to build your employer brand, attract talent, and gain referrals. If you’re leaving candidates hanging with no feedback, delaying the process, or adding additional stages, it’s unlikely your candidates will be recommending your business to their network. It’s not always easy to accurately measure the impact of a positive candidate experience, though it undoubtably adds to your talent brand and will likely improve other metrics other time. In terms of improving candidate experience, the best thing you can do is to seek feedback from all your applicants on their experience of your process, and their recruiter if applicable.

Candidate experience boils down to clarity of metric driven goals internally and ensuring that the external focus is on experience matched with performance. A simple phrase to sun up a positive candidate experience: “Say what you’re going to do, do it, then tell them you did it.” It’s truly that simple. More scientifically speaking, candidate NPS metrics are NOT the same as Glassdoor reviews (those are given by employees not candidates). They are also most commonly measured with a set of questions directly related to the process with a 1 to 10 Likert scale. How to set up the right questions and subsequently measure CXP is often incorrectly implemented.