Top 8 Talent Acquisition Metrics to Track

The job market is influenced by rapid technological advancements, workforce diversity, and the need for businesses to adapt. These dynamics necessitate the implementation of accurate strategies for sourcing top talent.

Organizations must go beyond mere templates for talent acquisition planning. They must evaluate their recruitment effectiveness using key talent acquisition metrics, ensuring alignment with business objectives and improving hiring outcomes.

In this post, let's find the top 8 talent acquisition metrics to track.

Why are talent acquisition metrics important?

Measuring talent acquisition metrics enables organizations to achieve the following: 

• Strategic Alignment: Cross-department and cross-role agreement on organizational priorities is essential. Comprehensive data metrics help businesses determine their priorities.
• Optimize Decision-making: Data-driven insights provide clear direction for recruitment strategies
• Enhance Long-Term Performance: Evaluate hires’ lifetime value, including performance, productivity, and organizational fit. 
• Resource Optimization: It is essential to understand that adequately distributing the budget and team’s time to the most promising talent acquisition strategies is the key to the company's sustainable development. 
• Improve Candidate Experience: Metrics pinpoint areas where candidate engagement falters, helping retain top talent throughout the hiring process. 

Key Talent Acquisition Metrics to Track

Here are the key talent acquisition metrics that every business should be tracking:

1. Time to Hire

Time to hire is a critical talent acquisition KPI that denotes days taken to fill a vacancy from the day the vacancy is posted till a candidate is hired. Observing this metric allows organizations to evaluate the effectiveness of their recruitment system and its components.

Long hiring processes can annoy candidates, making them disinterested in the organization and its recruiting processes. Shortening the hiring duration enhances the candidates' experience and helps keep the suitable candidates interested. For instance, a company hiring employees in less than 25 days on average shows that it can identify suitable applicants promptly.

Time to Hire Formula:  

Time to Hire = Total Days from Application to Acceptance / Number of Hires

To shorten the recruitment process, redundancies in the interview stages should be eliminated, job descriptions should be revised, and AI in candidate screening can be adopted to eliminate delays and improve efficiency.

2. Time to Fill

The time to fill is another metric that evaluates the number of days spent posting a job until a candidate is hired. It helps assess the operational performance of the recruiting process. While it is always good to take time and look for the best candidates, spending more than expected in hiring processes can reveal some gaps. 

For example, if it takes 30 days to fill a software engineer position, this may tell a great deal about the adjustments needed at some stages of the hiring process.

In a recent study, this indicator was found to average 68 days to fill, the longest average period since 2011. Companies that wish to compete healthily with prospective candidates must try hard to do better than this threshold.

Time to Fill Formula:

Time to Fill = Total Days from Posting to Hire / Number of Positions Filled

Time to fill helps in effective recruitment procedures by indicating to the recruiters and the hiring managers the time frames within which the roles can be filled, assisting in proper, timely recruitment planning. However, this measure will also depend on the demand for a given role and how fast the team can hire or fill the position.

3. Quality of Hire

Quality of hire evaluates the effectiveness of recruited employees in terms of their performance, productivity, organizational fit, and turnover within a specific timeframe. This measure indicates the extent to which the recruitment process is on target with the functional objectives and requirements of the organization. 

Quality of hire is regarded as the ultimate goal. This is because it defines the effectiveness of a given recruitment process in an organization. These people perform beyond expectations and contribute to the team significantly, increasing efficiency. On the contrary, hiring the wrong person can lead to losses equal to or over 30% of their salary within the first year of employment, explaining the need for this measurement.

Quality of Hire Formula (One Approach):

Quality of Hire = (Performance + Productivity + Retention) Score / 3

Incorporating structured interviews, coding tests, and task-based assessments to enhance the hiring standard can help improve this metric.

4. Cost Per Hire

The cost-per-hire metric determines how much a firm pays to recruit a new employee. This metric covers sourcing, agency and referral fees, traveling, relocating, and internal recruitment costs. For example, an IT company with a disruptive high cost per hire may have to work on cutting down costs on various recruiting channels or else invest more in internal referrals.

Cost per Hire Formula:

Cost per Hire = (Internal Recruiting Costs + External Recruiting Costs) / Number of Hires

In practice, there are limits to the amount of expenditure that may be incurred during the recruitment process. A low cost per hire indicates the health of a company’s modes of recruiting, while a high cost per hire points out a lack of competitiveness in certain aspects.

To cut costs, organizations can employ cheaper alternatives, such as employee referrals, virtual recruitment occasions, and management of employer image.

5. Source of Hire

This metric concentrates on identifying the origin of successful candidates through a job board, employee referral, or other means. Proper analysis of these sources helps organizations know which channels produce quality candidates. For example, if LinkedIn has shown concrete results in successful business hires, an organization may increase and put more resources and budgets into this platform.

Knowing where to find the best candidates helps make the hiring process less complicated and better use of resources. Companies can track and prioritize high-quality sources and invest more in the ones that constantly provide strong candidates.

6. Offer Acceptance Rate

The offer acceptance rate is the ratio of the number of job offers accepted by candidates to the total job offers made, which indicates how appealing an organization is likely to be to prospective candidates.

In simple words, this is a measure of how attractive the offer is in the market. A high acceptance rate reflects a healthy employer brand, pay rate, and the extent to which the job has been sold to the candidate.

Offer Acceptance Rate Formula: 

Offer Acceptance Rate = (Total Number of Accepted Offers / Total Number of Offer Made) x 100

For an organization to enhance its offer accepted ratio, it can find ways to research what its rivals offer regarding salaries and benefits and write proper and objective job descriptions. In addition, as a practical matter, gauging a candidate’s wants and needs at the onset of the hiring period can facilitate making offers that will meet such expectations.

7. Diversity and Inclusion

This measure concentrates on the demographic composition of new hires, including gender, ethnic factors, and age. This is important as it allows businesses to evaluate their recruitment efforts for a more diverse workforce with different backgrounds and viewpoints.

Research confirms that 87% of diverse teams make better decisions, emphasizing how important diversity is to achieve an organization's purpose.

Organizations can establish and pursue clear diversity objectives to improve this metric, make exceptions in their recruitment policies and conduct recruitment activities with different job boards. Hiring for diversity, writing inclusive job descriptions, and setting up fair recruitment processes can further promote diversity within the company.

8. Retention Rate

This metric illustrates the ability of a company to keep its employees for an extended period. This reflects the success of the processes involved in attracting talent and the conditions in the organization. A high retention rate indicates employee contentment and involvement, enhancing the recruitment, onboarding and overall workplace culture.

Retention Rate Formula:

Retention Rate = ((Total Employees – Employees who left)/ Total Employees) x 100

To improve this performance indicator, companies can enhance their onboarding programs, offer well-defined career prospects, and manage employee engagement to keep their best talent. Likewise, providing educational opportunities for professionals and creating a friendly atmosphere will also help.

Conclusion

It has become highly imperative to adopt appropriate talent acquisition metrics to create a workforce that is both flexible and sustainable. Thus, the abovementioned metrics provide more insightful ways to improve recruitment strategies.

iMocha helps organizations automate this process with the help of its AI-powered Skills Intelligence Platform. It also enables recruiters to hire top talent by providing skills assessment, skills integration and skills gap analysis.

FAQs

What are talent acquisition metrics?

Talent acquisition metrics are indicators like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and quality of hire, used to assess recruitment success and align with business goals.

How do talent acquisition metrics align with organizational goals?

These metrics ensure that the recruitment strategies adopted maintain the organization's objectives by enhancing the recruitment process, improving the recruits' caliber, and aligning the recruited employees to the organization's goals.

What tools can help track talent acquisition metrics?

Platforms such as iMocha empowers organizations with AI-driven tools to automate skill assessments, track recruitment metrics, and optimize talent acquisition strategies.