239,000 Sourcing Metrics

That’s the number of results on Google for the search term “Sourcing Metrics”

I didn’t read them all, but I scanned enough to make my eyes bleed.

The question of what metrics to goal your sourcing team comes up a lot, and I have been getting asked this question consistently in the last few years. Enough so, that it made me decide to write 239,001, as what I really did not find much content around was metrics that focus on the identification, attraction and measurement of proactive outbound sourcing.

Too many sourcing teams are structured and measured by inbound activities, which I personally think is a miss given the whole point of a sourcing team IMHO, is to have them attracting talent that is not looking at your opportunities. I don’t see the point. Why not just hire more recruiters if you’re going to do that?

The whole point of a Soucing team should be to tackle the difficult to fill roles that are mission critical to the business. Usually this will be about 20% of your hires a year. If you are going to point a sourcer at the reqs where 80% of the hires come to you (Job Postings, Social links, Employee Referrals, etc), then why not just hire more recruiters again?

Important point: When I make the statement “candidates that are not looking at your opportunities”, I am not just talking about passive candidates. I am talking about anyone, regardless if they are active, passive, semi active passive, whatever you want the label to be. If a sourcer can find all the candidates they need by looking in their own ATS/CRM or on a job board, why should you care.

First off, I’m not a fan of goaling sourcers on the number of targeted leads they enter into a system. That activity is just a means to an end, and I would prefer to measure the outcomes. The same applies for measuring sourcers on number of emails or dials made in a day. When you getting to that level of measurement you’re really micro managing. So, focus on the outcomes instead.

To do this though, you really need a starting point around what averages in your funnel metrics might look like to produce a hire. Example of a simple recruiting funnel:

Regardless If you do (or don’t) believe sourcers should be goaled on hires, the activities performed, ultimately relate to trying to get people hired. That fact I hope we can all agree on.

Let’s start with the example above of it takes 8 Hiring Manager Accepts of candidates being submitted (regardless if it’s from a recruiter or a sourcer) to produce a hire.

That’s your starting point. Yes, a good leader will look to improve that to 5:1 over time, but let’s just start where you are currently at for this exercise.

But, hold on a second Rob. I thought you said a minute ago the focus here is on outbound sourcing? See what I did here. I’m checking if you’re paying attention 

If you know enough about outbound Soucing, expecting a sourcer to generate 8 passive candidates for each req they are working on is craziness. So, what do we goal them on?

Quality is the focus

Quality of candidates being accepted by the hiring manager that they submit (Submittal to Business Acceptance). 80% is your starting point regardless of what type of req they are working on. You could nearly argue it could be 100% acceptance, but you do need a little bit of wiggle room, especially when starting new searches for the first time that you might not have worked before. Calibration is bound to happen, but you could probably push it to 90% over time.

If they do a solid job capturing the key requirements for the role, which in turn is agreed to by the hiring manager and the recruiter they are partnering with, then you will quickly identify where the issues are in your process when the recruiter or hiring manager rejects more than 20% of the candidates being submitted.

Yes, some req’s are going to be difficult given the supply/demand of talent in the market. They might only submit two candidates for that req. 80% of two candidates won’t work at the req level. I am talking about the overall average of all req’s that source is working on over a week/month. You/They still need to keep a close eye on things at the individual req level to determine if something is wrong, but the whole point is if you make quality the focus, then the hires should come.

You will definitely find situations where a sourcer is consistently hitting 80%, but candidates are not making it through to a hire. Is that the sourcers fault? Nope. If you/they are doing a solid job on the requirements gathering, which is agreed to by all, then they are doing what you pay them to do.

Yes, it could be a miss on salary, or what the hiring manager originally agreed too ends up being different in the actual interview process. Yes, we logically want to identify the root causes and fix this, but you can’t point the finger back as the primary reason people are not getting hired is squarely on the sourcer. That is why the primary goal focus must be the SBA metric.

Quantity is the challenge

Quantity of candidates being submitted is where you will find the real challenge lies when goaling sourcers. If you think in the traditional mindset and goal them like you would a recruiter who owns the inbound channel, then you’re going to create some problems. Here is an example of some analysis I have done in the past for context of the variables in throughput metrics:

What I see generally happens, is leaders will end up giving the sourcer multiple channels to own, like employee referrals or even owning screening candidates applying to the req. If you do this, then you might think your solving the problem, but you’re creating another at the same time. See the problem is that while your sourcing team is producing hires from the inbound channels, they will not have the time to do the proactive outbound sourcing that should be core to your strategy.

Its back to a breadth vs depth problem. That was why sourcing became a specialization in the first place. Recruiters did not have the time (primarily) to proactively identify and build relationships with talent that was not actively looking.

If you agree that the focus should be on those 20% of difficult to fill roles, then don’t dilute the focus from that activity just so you can justify a volume of hires from a Soucing team. It takes an investment mindset to build a Soucing team with a proactive outbound focus. It’s also going to take courage and conviction to hold to the strategy when speaking to HR and Business leadership as well. My experience is most will come to the table with a POV that’s historically grounded in full life-cycle recruiting, or goodness forbid, comments like “Recruiting’s not hard, don’t you just post a job?”.

While I would not suggest a target on the number of candidates being submitted at the req level, you should still try and have a weekly goal on number of submittals.

Important point: You will first need to start observing your sourcing team to determine a correct goal here. All reqs are not created equal, so you can’t measure/goal every sourcer the same. I don’t know how robust your ATS/CRM is with potential talent there. I don’t know the specifics of your 20% hard to fill reqs, and the associated market supply/demand.

Sorry folks, no easy button answer to this one. You are going to have to work out what is the right goal for your team yourself.

Create a Pipeline metric

Regardless if you have your sourcers working in your ATS or a CRM, you want to create a metric that shows progress of relationships being developed. In simple terms, something like this workflow:

Cold = Targeted Name/Title/Company, but not yet contacted.

Warm = Contacted, pre-screened, initial interest but the timing is not right (for them or you)

Hot = They are ready to make the move but you need to find an open req (or maybe create the opportunity which some companies do = Opportunistic hiring).

Matched to an Open Req = Just that.

The specific metric is to show movement of a person from:

Cold to Warm

Warm to Hot

Hot to Matched to an Open Req

Same as the Quantity challenge, if you have not measured sourcers on this activity historically, then you are going to need to observe some historical data first before determining a goal given the variabilities as above.

Important Note: Make sure when you set this up, you are clear with your sourcing team that the people you want added to this workflow are for the 20% hard to fill reqs. It should be used for people that you know are potential solid future hires. You have done your homework and know which companies and which titles of people are the ones you want to develop a relationship with.

If you want more detail on the persona types that you would want to build (or continue) a relationship with, then you can read the details of the TRM (Talent Relationship Management) methodology here.

When I have done this in the past, some hires took 18months from the moment the first contact was made to the ultimate hire. Was it worth it for the hard to fill roles, heck yes. Would I do this for the other 80%, probably not given the majority of those should be a just in time strategy and building relationship with people at scale is just too darn expensive across the whole enterprise (time + money).

Like most relationships, they take time to nurture and cultivate, so you need to set clear expectations with leadership that this is a strategic investment strategy. It’s going to take time, but over time, it’s worth it as I point out in the associated TRM article.

What not to goal sourcers on

I gave you what I believe are the three-key metrics to measure and goal a sourcer by. Here is a list of what I would not create goals around for sourcers:

• Anything past SBA (Submittal to Business Acceptance) = Offers/Hires.
• No of Cold leads added to a TRM Workflow = Micro managing busy work.
• Source of Application/Hire = Who cares where the hires come from. Sure, track it, refine your channel strategy accordingly, but don’t goal sourcers by it.
• Speed Metrics = Identifying and attracting quality talent is the priority here. It takes much longer to identify and attract, so why set time goals like the ones you use for inbound candidates? Again, track how long it takes to move through your workflow process so you identify challenges, but don’t set goals for your sourcers against speed metrics.

Cost Avoidance.

While I have this under the don’t goal your sourcers section, I think it is still worth noting that one way to get executive support quickly, is to show the value of a sourcing team around cost avoidance.

Many a sourcing team has been built with proving out the short-term value of reducing the traditional agency spend. While you don’t want to set individual cost avoidance goals for your sourcers, if you’re a sourcing or recruiting leader, it makes sense to show how you can save the company historical agency spend as a goal.

While your sourcing strategy should be built around a longer-term investment, any short-term wins will logically buy you credibility, especially with traditional mindsets from business leaders looking at recruiting as a cost center.

If you want a little more reading on reducing agency spend, then here is a previous article on the subject.