3 Essential KPIs for Recruiting in 2021

Although we have a challenging candidate market in 2021, recruiters should be focused on delivering for their clients, not excuses nor acceptance of underperformance.?In my last article, I wrote about the factors and challenges of hiring in 2021 here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/candidate-market-2021-william-spengler/ .

It’s not just corporate recruiters that are challenged in 2021, it is also the top agency recruiters in the United States who are also struggling to deliver. ?This article is written for internal talent acquisition leaders and agency recruiters and its main point is to suggest recruiters to examine these 3 fundamental KPIs that lead to delivery consistently over time.

This article is written by William Spengler, Principal Recruiter & Founder of Frederick Fox. www.frederickfox.com . Different. Better. We Deliver. ?

So, what are the three KPIs? How do we get results and deliver? How do we fill all these open jobs in such a challenging labor market?

In order to deliver, we need to take a helicopter view of all the action steps in the recruiting cycle that lead to delivery. For example, I could say “lose weight”, but it would be a better exercise if I instead zoomed in on the habits, stages, and action items needed overtime to lose weight. So, let’s take a look at the action items and steps in the recruiting process over time that lead to recruiting delivery:

Phases of Recruiting:

1.?????Intake with Hiring Manager

2.?????Critical Thinking & Brainstorming

3.?????Sourcing

4.?????Outreach & Engagement

5.?????Interviewing

6.?????Matching

7.?????Handoffs- Presenting candidates to hiring Manager

8.?????Sendouts- Candidates interviewing with the Hiring Manager

9.?????Managing interview process (Prep & Debrief)

10.??Offer

11.??Background & Onboarding

12.??Start Date

13.??Training

14.??Post-Hire & Retention

I bold the three fundamental KPIs in the recruiting process and these are Interviews, Handoffs, and Sendouts.

I can already hear it now from the SourceCon community. What about sourcing? Why isn’t sourcing bolded?

Well, yes sourcing is extremely important, but we need to realize that the core point of sourcing is to lead to more interviews, handoffs, and send-outs. Sourcing and fancy sourcing (tools, platforms, Booleans, X-ray, AI, scraping) lead us to more outreach and engagement and our outreach and engagement ultimately lead to more interviews. Our interviewing leads to matching and our accurate matching leads to more “Sendouts” for the hiring manager. If fancy sourcing isn’t leading to more interviews, handoffs, and sendouts then you may want to divert course from focusing on sourcing. You could be sourcing for the art of sourcing instead of sourcing for hiring manager results.

Instead of focusing on getting Crunchbase, Seekout, LOXO, Github, Stack Overflow, Recruity, Swordfish, Hiretual, etc. you may want to take a step back and examine the activity before examining the tools. You may not have a race car driver in your race car.

While each of these phases of the recruiting cycle listed above has many sub-activities, technical hacks (automation & AI), and strategic positioning, the activities that lead to results consistently over time are Interviews, Handoffs, Sendouts. So, if you are struggling to see results, you may want to ask yourself some of these questions:

·???????How many interviews am I doing a week?

·???????How many Handoffs am I doing a week?

·???????How many Sendouts am I doing a week?

·???????How many Sendouts do I have in Queue?

·???????How many people am I sourcing each week?

·???????How many people am I reaching out to and engaging?

·???????How is my sourcing transitioning to engagement?

·???????How is my engagement transition to interviewing?

·???????How is my interviewing transition to matching?

·???????Is my matching leading to hiring manager interest and sendouts?

·???????How can I make more phone calls or streamline a system that leads to more interviews, handoffs, and sendouts?

·???????Where is my bottleneck?

The probabilities of success in recruiting remain consistent when we look at KPIs over time.

We cannot control the outcome of an individual transaction nor can we control people. But what a recruiter can control is their KPIs over time and set up strategic questions and checkpoints through the recruiting process to minimize risk over time.