Activity ≠ Impact

Hi Recruiters,

Recruiting success can be a tough nut to crack. It sways with the shifts in the talent market and should look slightly different from business to business. Yet, the ways we measure success are often standardized.

I enjoyed coming across this take from Andrew Lewis :

In the current market, where, in many industries, whittling down a few top candidates from thousands of inbound applicants can make it easy to hit your numbers, I’d argue the best recruiters are figuring out ways to get more done with less (or different) activity. That’s kind of the whole point of any strategy.

Let’s discuss an example scenario:

Two recruiters are working to fill the same role. There are 900 applications, and the recruiters are expected to put three candidates forward by the end of the week.

Recruiter A grinds through nearly every application, emails their top 30 applicants with an invitation for a phone screen, speaks to 22 of them, and decides to move their top 5 choices through the process.?

Recruiter B asks the hiring manager if they have any referrals. After receiving three names, they find that those three individuals have also already applied. After reviewing their applications, they screen all three and put them all through.

Which approach is best??

Using standard, quantitative metrics, like time-to-fill, time-to-hire, or offer acceptance rate, the data could easily tell an identical story. If the recruiting team is being measured by outreach activity, Recruiter A’s approach might look to be more thorough. But, if qualitative measurements such as candidate experience or candidate quality are considered, it seems likely that those scores would be higher for the less-stressed recruiter who could give their candidates more attention and provide a more personalized experience (not to mention make life easier on the hiring manager).

It’s not to say that one method of finding candidates is better than the other, but to point out that without a more balanced set of metrics, there’s less opportunity to hone in on what does work best for the needs of the business—and therefore optimize for efficiency and effectiveness.

As recruiters take on more strategic roles and data-driven TA matures, understanding how organizations or clients define success and implementing practical steps to measure it will remain a highly valuable trait.

Blessing = Curse

Any recent survey of talent leaders out there highlights how a growing number of CHROs now see recruiters as strategic talent advisors to the business. This shift means that we need to focus on metrics that go beyond numbers.

This is especially important when considering just how much of traditional recruiting activity is soon to be fully automated. In a recent article , Chris Hoyt points out how this transformation will enable “recruiters [to] spend less time screening and more time building relationships with candidates.” The trick will be to determine how to build successful relationships in the context of the business that you’re serving.

It’s hard to measure the quality of a relationship based on quantitative metrics alone. For example, I may interact with my mother-in-law more often than my best friend, but which relationship do you think brings me more joy?

(I can think of a few ways to measure that…)

We need to consider how our hiring decisions impact business outcomes, starting from the very tip of the spear in talent attraction and continuing through the end of the employee lifecycle. With that mindset, recruiting becomes coupled with an organization’s strategic goals.

It’s a blessing and a curse. The blessing is the more strategic a function becomes, the more likely it is to receive additional budget and resources to be successful (and the more money is available to those who figure out really good recipes for success). The curse is that the more strategic value a role has, the more pressure there is from the business to prove that the additional investment is worth it.

Creating a Narrative

The topic came up in an episode of Recruiter Therapy. Nichole Foley , who shared her experience working at a major tech company (the name rhymes with “Oogle”). As a master of understanding and managing to metrics, Nicole’s insight is both enlightening and chilling:

“Everything was about delivery against demand. I was constantly measured and micromanaged. I was always looking at dashboards. When one of my teams would fall below the expected percentages, we’d have to sit down and talk about ‘why?’. Not only did we need to fix it, we needed a good anecdote in our explanation to management. And, if you didn’t hit your DEI numbers, as an example, there was no way to surpass expectations.”

The key point is that when a strategy becomes its metrics rather than metrics determining its success, you lose the human side of recruiting. In other words, as Daniel Harten followed up in the conversation to say, “Good leaders have a good narrative in addition to, or despite, the data.”

Success is not just about hitting numbers; it’s about understanding the stories behind those numbers and using that understanding to make better decisions.

As I’ve said before , this isn’t to suggest that you must have complex tech stacks or build sophisticated attribution models to begin pulling out valuable, data-driven insights. Instead, it’s to encourage recruiters to be thinking about how they can better understand who their target should be and how best to appeal to them.

I’m interested to know how your recruitment metrics have evolved. How has this changed your activity? And, what has been the impact?

What else is happening in hiring?

• Where Talent Acquisition Processes Fail—and How to Fix Them by Kathryn Moody , featuring insights from Tim Sackett, SPHR, SCP
• Bad Hiring Practices Are Harming Employer Brands, Shrinking Talent Pools by Hailey Mensik
• US Hiring Slowed in June, Raising Hopes for Interest Rate Cuts

Aaron’s Corner

Aaron Iba?ez here! If you're a fan of the insights you've gotten from subscribing to this newsletter, you're really going to love our upcoming virtual conference: hireEZ RecruitCon.

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— Recruiters