What’s your Recruiting Batting Average?
Pitchers and catchers have reported.. Players descended on the field last week. Spring training is officially in full swing, and baseball fans around the world are eagerly awaiting opening pitches. Statistics are a staple of the game of baseball - arguably, no sport has a closer relationship with the statistics that track each and every play.
Similarly, talent leaders closely track every “play” as well when it comes to recruiting. But with their own long list of stats and metrics to track, which ones matter most?
Most talent leaders tend to want to measure their recruiting success by things like “time to fill” and “cost to fill” positions - not to mention the elusive “quality of hire” metric, which means different things to different organizations. And then there is the “source of hire” metric which is becoming nearly impossible to track, as it’s not as simple as measuring if you found a person/resume on LinkedIn, given all the sources candidates come from these days.
Where you found a person/resume doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you initiated contact (the message/intro), and who reached out (was it the recruiter or the manager or friend?) And was that person passive or actively looking at the time? The answer would impact how long it took to fill the position, and so on and so forth.
We’re suggesting a few important, yet, simple stats that you can track and utilize as you consider the Recruiting Batting Average (RBA) of your bench of recruiters. These all have some very powerful applications.
4 Metrics to Improve your Recruiting Batting Average:
- Time to Qualified Candidate (Average)
While most people want to try and measure the time to fill a position, an equally important statistic is the time to introduce a qualified candidate to a hiring manager. Whenever a hiring manager has a new position open, they are immediately anxious to start reviewing applicants, And they will measure their recruiters based upon how quickly they can provide them with quality candidates.
No systematic way to measure this one? You can often grab this stat within your ATS. Simply look at when the job requisition was posted, and find when an initial interview date was set for the first candidate on any req. This should quickly and easily get you an average number for every category of position and recruiter. Knowing this stat will help you to set future expectations with hiring managers, along with helping to measure your recruiter’s speed on the front end of the recruiting process.
2. # of Applicants to Qualified Offer and Hire by Hiring Manager
This is an important stat that will help you to measure your hiring managers (without telling them right away), in terms of how finicky they are. Most recruiting budgets are provided by different departments and even sometimes by manager, and the reality is, different managers have very different “requirements” for candidates. While one manager only takes 5 candidate intros to find a qualified candidate to interview, some other managers might take 20! Do you know where you stand here with your hiring managers?
You could even go so far as to calculate the cost per qualified candidate by hiring manager to show them that they cost 10x more than all of the other hiring managers due to this factor and therefore might need to donate more to the recruiting budget annually to continue to have this level of matching requirements. We realize that this can be due to recruiter quality, but some level of measuring manager fit/quality is a good practice and stat to measure.
3. Responses by Social Sites
Knowing what social channels and methods are getting you the most results is going to become more and more important. For example, many recruiters complain that nobody reads their InMail messages on LinkedIn, but are also unwilling to directly connect to candidates and send them Standard LinkedIn messages when these are proven to convert at much higher levels. Knowing this across your recruiting teams would help you to propagate best practices across your teams. It will also give you examples to point at which will quiet the naysayers that are always saying things like “candidates don’t accept connection requests,” when you can point to one of your recruiters and show that they sent 100 connection requests last week and 80 got accepted.
Tracking this metric will help you to catch new patterns of success with Twitter, Facebook messaging, WhatsApp, Instagram, Github, and any other emerging sites with on-network messaging capabilities. Don’t have a way to do automated and personalized social messaging? ZapInfo can help. We give recruiters the ability to personalize messages based on contact fields, skills, education, and send it to anyone, via any number of social channels for much more personalized engagement. In fact, our users report up to 50% faster social recruiting with ZapInfo’s help. Not a bad way to improve your Recruiting Batting Average!
4. # of Connections per Recruiter (Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Knowing which of your recruiters is most connected is a great stat to know. You should set targets for every recruiter. Better yet, knowing not only how many connections per recruiter and by source, but being able to segment those connections by talent type is even better, and will be extremely useful when needing to recruit certain types of talent.
These four stats will prove valuable when you look at accelerating the time it takes to find, engage, deliver and hire top talent in today’s tight economy. What else would you add to our list? Any other tried and true methods for measuring these stats? Comment below!