How do you measure your success as a recruiter?
Is it your total placements for the year? Your position on the office leader board? Your take home pay?
Those things are important, of course. But they tell you more about your ability as a sales person, than your abilities as a recruiter.
And if that’s all you care about, fair enough, but this article isn’t for you.
But if your skill as a recruiter IS important to you, even if it’s only so that you can progress to higher profile, managed service contracts, you’re going to want to keep reading.
Most of us have a gut feeling about whether we’re doing a good job. In recruitment, aside from our earnings, we pay attention to how clients and candidates respond to us and whether we have a good working relationship and rapport.
Those things are a good sign, but they’re only part of the equation. The fact is, for a healthy, long-term pipeline, there are a number of important data points that you should be measuring and tracking.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are five that you should consider to be critical.
1. Length of Time to Hire
I’ve talked a lot about the need for a thorough recruitment strategy. Consultative recruiters never sling CVs at a client after only a couple of days and hope something sticks. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in speed and efficiency.
Your clients, if you’ve managed expectations correctly, will be expecting a focus on quality rather than speed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get impatient if you drag your feet. And efficient recruitment also increases the number of assignments you can handle over the course of the year.
The key with this metric is to measure average hire times – from the day you receive your instruction to the on boarding of the new hire – across roles and levels, and try to reduce that figure without compromising on quality.
2. Candidate Sourcing Channels
Measuring where candidates come from is highly instructive because it tells you where to focus your time and money. If a particular job board, for instance, never delivers, you can close this avenue and focus on what actually works.
But don’t stop there.
Be sure to ask your successful candidates how they first heard about the role. If 90% of ALL your candidates are coming from LinkedIn, but 90% of your SUCCESSFUL candidates are coming through referrals, you can adjust accordingly.
3. Cost to Hire
This one is so obvious it almost goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Just in case.
Because if you don’t know how much your work costs to complete, you’ll never know if you’re charging enough or if every job you take is bringing you closer to bankruptcy.
However, even if you’re already measuring this figure, it’s worth taking another look to ensure you’re including ALL associated costs. Think about advertisement costs, management of social media, time spent interviewing and assessing candidates, administration work, software costs, and so on.
4. Acceptance Ratio
This number will, hopefully, be low. But track it so you can react quickly if the numbers start to trend the wrong way.
It’s also useful to segment this data by recruiter. If it’s unusually high for an individual or individuals, you might be able to identify a training need.
5. Retention Rate
If you’ve been reading my articles for any length of time, you knew this was coming. What percentage of your placements are still in position after 12 months and after 24 months?
It’s still a metric that most recruiters neglect because it doesn’t obviously impact the bottom line and there’s a perception that it’s out of a recruiter’s control.
I won’t rehash the arguments here (check any number of my previous articles for why this number is so critical) but suffice to say that this data point wins us business and is a USP that lets us outflank our competition. Over and over again.
Gathering the data isn’t even that difficult. Most of the time you can track your placements progress via LinkedIn. And in the rare cases where an individual isn’t using the platform, a brief phone call is usually enough to confirm whether or not they are still in the role.
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Four out of the above directly impact profits (the fifth does so, indirectly) but they also speak to your effectiveness and abilities as a recruiter. Efficiency and accuracy should be the aspiration of every recruiter, especially if you’re seeking to develop as a consultative recruiter and win retainers and managed service contracts.
It’s easy to get sucked into obsessing over the bottom line, especially when it’s so often used as a badge of honour in the industry (i.e. something to brag about), but mastery and expertise go way beyond profits.
Long-term reputation as a recruitment professional requires loftier ambition.