Advice for measuring recruiting performance

Recruiting analysts and HR leaders, here is some advice about measuring recruiting performance:

1. Unless your job requisitions close as unfilled at some point regardless of recruiting activity, it's impossible to estimate the expected time to fill (or eliminate) a job requisition. So stop doing it.

2. It is, however, possible to estimate the rate at which job requisitions are filled and eliminated, respectively, given the time since they were approved.

3. From those rates, it is possible to estimate the fraction of job requisitions that are filled and eliminated, respectively, within a given number of days after approval. These metrics are called cumulative incidence functions.

4. Similarly, suppose you want to know the fraction of requisitions that have been open for a month that will be filled some days after the first month. We can do that, too. These metrics are called conditional cumulative incidence functions.

5. From the cumulative incidence functions and conditional cumulative incidence functions, it is possible to forecast the number of requisitions you will have filled and eliminated, respectively, by a certain recruiting deadline given the requisitions currently in your pipeline.

6. It is also possible to estimate how these cumulative incidence functions and forecasts vary across different jobs, departments, approval year cohorts, etc.

7. It's also possible to break out fill rates by internal versus external hire.

8. It is, unfortunately, very difficult to estimate the causal impact of some intervention on your recruiting performance. Like, literally some of the brightest minds in the world are as of right now trying to figure out ways to do it that don't make bonkers assumptions.

So hang tight and, for now, at least measure and forecast your recruiting performance correctly.