What metrics does your recruitment department track?

I recently sat in on a great presentation about six sigma processes and how it applies to call centers. I’m not technically on the operations side of call centers, but I have done a fair amount of work with them over the years, and still consult with many of them on the recruitment side of the house. I think that there are lot correlations between the two industries, especially in the way that everything you do can be measured, and the most successful organizations, whether it’s recruitment or call centers, do a ton of performance measurement and analysis on the data they collect.

As I listened, a few things began to run through my head. I began to think about how many recruitment organizations, both on the corporate side and on the agency side, don’t measure their recruiters’ production. I also began to think about what key performance indicators are the most important to measure for a recruiting department, regardless of the environment, industry, corporate, RPO, temp agency or contingent search. It shouldn’t matter. There are probably additional metrics that may be important to you based on what you are recruiting, but in general the core KPI’s (key performance indicator’s) should be the same for every organization. They should also be derived from the needs of your customer as any six sigma black belt would tell you before they sweep your legs.

Regardless of whom your client is in recruitment, whether it’s an internal hiring manager or a company with whom you’ve just signed a large recruitment outsourcing deal, the definition of a successful engagement will be defined by a few common themes, and should be used as a basis for determining what indicators should be measured internally by your delivery team.
These include:

• Quality of hire
• Speed to fill
• Retention
• Candidate/hiring manager experience

If you peel back the onion from these key metrics, the next logical question to ask is what recruiter activities can best be directly correlated to these metrics to ensure success. There are a lot of things that a recruiting director can look at, but I think from my experience the most important things to look at would include:

• Hires per month
• Submittals per week
• Phone interviews per week
• Submittal to interview ratio- 90% goal or above
• Interview to hire interview- 80% goal or above
• Hire to successful placement goal (defined as completion of 90 days employment) – 90% goal or above
• New qualified prospects added to database/hot book each week

Why don’t recruiting organizations measure KPI’s?

From what I’ve seen, there are a few main reasons why organizations don’t measure any key performance indicators, and I don’t necessarily agree with any of them. Here are a few that I came up with :

• Don’t know what to measure
• Don’t know how to measure the data
• Don’t know where to get the data
• Don’t know what they should use to benchmark good activity from bad
• Don’t have time to measure.

And yes, it takes a lot of time and investment to track, analyze and manage using this process. While some organizations don’t invest enough in their employees to make sure that they have the tools and training they need to be successful (sink or swim), those that want to be competitive are going to have to start.

Is there such a thing as micromanagement?

Personally, I think that too much of anything is bad (unless it revolves around golfing or fishing). There’s such a thing as “over-management” of your organization’s metrics, and what that “over-management” is will depend on the tenure of your recruiting team. The less experience, the more they need to have the structure of a six sigma type process. But if you try to hold tenured recruiters to a micromanaged process, you run the risk of losing good people, so you need to keep a balance based on the degree of talent you are managing. Without any metrics, though, you run the risk of losing that new client or the trust of your internal hiring managers, creating even bigger problems.

John Hassett