Every company wants to ensure that new hires contribute to the bottom line. As hiring budgets get cut everywhere, the pressure is higher than ever on recruiting managers to demonstrate the kind of ROI that recruiting programs are expected to deliver.
The fact is, recruiting top talent is always a good investment. High-performing employees are up to eight times more productive, and early-career candidates, in particular, tend to have longer tenures while performing comparably to senior employees. Being diligent about tracking and analyzing metrics related to recruitment efficiency and outcomes can help you:
Let’s talk about how you can make this happen.
Recruiters use several metrics to assess the impact of their recruitment strategies. The most popular ones tend to be easy to grasp conceptually and easy to measure. These are the metrics we recommend following.
This measures the cost of bringing a candidate onto your team. It includes all costs related to talent sourcing, screening, and recruiting, including:
This measures the percentage of job offers issued that get accepted. It’s measured as the ratio of the number of offers accepted to the number of offers made. Low offer acceptance rates could indicate problems at the later stages of the recruitment process—most commonly around salary negotiations.
This measures how long it takes to complete hiring a candidate - from when they apply for the job to when they accept the offer. Most companies are keen to keep this as low as possible, and studies show that top-performing companies tend to have 50% lower time-to-hire than their competitors.
ELTV measures net employee value to a company for the whole of an employee’s tenure. It considers the total of actions and interactions during that tenure, including activities that directly contribute to ROI as well as intangible contributions like pleasant behavior or attention to detail. It’s a concrete way to measure how useful an employee will be over time—and, by extension, how much investment the company should make in retaining and training them.
There are several recruiting metrics that can give recruiters a more nuanced perspective on their hiring strategy. These include:
Investing in tailored recruiting CRMs like Gem or Greenhouse helps to measure these metrics accurately and evaluate them in the broader context of how the end-to-end recruitment life cycle works.
Today, 87% of recruiters state that talent acquisition has become a more strategic function over the last year. Strategies to boost recruiting ROI typically focus on one or more of the following:
The following best practices will help you do this.
To attract quality candidates more likely to accept offers and stick along for the ride, you need to demonstrate that you’re an employer your prospective hires would want to work for. This calls for an employee-first approach to all your branding and outreach activities, from website content to social media.
For example, people tend to view generic statements about “life at work” with skepticism. Fortunately, there are alternatives—such as passing the mic directly to your employees for their input. CodePath’s employer partner Salesforce, for example, has accounts on all major social networks devoted to connecting students with open opportunities at the company. It includes user-generated content from current Salesforce interns, tips on the recruitment process, fun memes about life at Salesforce, and more.