What can effective recruitment and selection practices do for an organization?

In this blog post, we will discover how to measure effectiveness of recruitment and selection process.

Taking a data-driven approach to recruitment provides many advantages, including the ability to increase efficiency and optimise the experience of each candidate. Ultimately, this can lead to better-recruiting results and more consistent hiring.

The first thing to consider is, how do you know what metrics will work best for your specific processes and organisation?

Why measure your recruitment and selection process?

Recruitment is an integral part of human resources management because it helps organisations find new employees who are qualified for their positions. While involving various stages, like advertising job vacancies, screening applicants and selecting the best candidate for the job.

Measuring these recruitment efforts is valuable because it will help you identify where to improve and make your process more effective.

You'll also be able to find out what works for you and what doesn’t. Which is useful when creating a recruitment strategy.

How to measure recruitment process effectiveness

Recruitment metrics are a way to measure the success of your recruitment efforts. There are many metrics that you can use to measure your recruitment effectiveness, and they vary depending on the type of position you are hiring for. Some common metrics you can employ today are:

Return on investment

One metric is the return on investment or ROI. This calculates how much you’ve invested in a candidate and how much profit they have generated for your company, such as revenue or cost savings. A successful hire will generate a positive ROI for your company.

Cost per hire

Another way to measure recruitment success is by calculating an individual’s cost per hire (CPH).

This metric is an overview of the average cost to make a new hire. It includes all costs related to recruitment, as well as the purchase of equipment, onboarding, administrative costs and benefits. And that can depend on things like the size of your company, the seniority of the job and the number of channels you use to advertise vacancies.

The lower the CPH, the more successful that person has been at recruiting new employees for your company.

There are many strategies that can help reduce the cost per hire. These include:

• Building a talent pipeline
• Strengthening employer branding with social media
• Employee referrals
• Using an ATS to streamline the process

A good way to measure your cost per hire is to take your results and compare those with the average cost per hire in your industry.

Time to hire (Time to fill)

Time to hire reveals how many days pass during a recruitment process between the introduction of a candidate and when they are offered the position. This is also known as the time to fill (a position). Which is the speed at which a candidate moves through your hiring process after they apply can be illuminating for you and your recruiting team.

Increasing the speed of your hiring process will not only reduce the time it takes to find that perfect person but will also ensure they are not snatched up by another company.

The best way to make the most of your hiring process is to measure how long it takes you to move a candidate from one stage to another.

Doing this will help you find out where time and energy are being wasted. This way you can redirect your hiring team's efforts.

However, while the time taken to complete the process can be used as an indicator of success, it is important to keep in mind that this metric is not always indicative of success. For example, if the process takes more time because applicants are submitting a large number of applications, then the success rate may not change.

In some cases, it may be more appropriate to use other metrics such as the number of candidates interviewed or the number of offers made.

Quality of hire

Finding talent fast is important, but don't forget about quality - the two are equally important when it comes to recruitment. It is tricky to measure but content engagement can be a good indicator of success.

Thorough talent evaluation measures will help you achieve that. It leads to less turnover, increased productivity, a better culture and higher success rates. Continually measuring the quality of your hires will allow you to monitor the health of your company.

How to effectively measure the quality of hire?

First, you take the percentage of successful candidates accepted for a role, plus the percentage of those who stay employed, divided by two.

This result gives you a result that indicates successful high-quality candidates who are suited to the role and company.

Interview to hire ratio

It’s calculated by the average number of interviews made in order for a job offer to be made.

For example, A hiring manager may interview 5 people before offering the job to 1. This makes the interview to hire ratio 5:1.

The number of interviews a company conducts before making a decision on who to hire is an indicator of how well it recruits and screens its candidates. A strong interview to hire ratio can also be an indication that your company has been able to find and attract the best applicants for the job.

Candidate experience score

By surveying your candidate experiences, you can gauge how well your recruitment process is. By having a high scoring candidate experience, you can improve your company's reputation and attract top talent.

We’ve talked previously about some great examples of candidate experiences, and how these extremely positive recruitment practices shape their company image. Take a look at Heineken for a great example.

Offer Acceptance Rate

The offer acceptance rate is an immediately useful recruiter productivity metric. It’s a comparison between the number of candidates given job offers and the number that accept.

If your organisation has a low offer acceptance rate, you might need to adjust the acceptance criteria or make your offers more competitive or possibly speed up your hire time.

Application Drop Off Rate

This is where applicants begin to apply for your job but never finish the application process.

When you improve this metric you attract better talent and improve the candidate experience.

Some reasons for applicant drop off could be:

• The application process is too long (longer than the average of 30 mins).
• Not optimising your application process for mobile.
• Asking for extraneous information that makes people uncomfortable to give out.

Source of Hire

Where you recruit from has a huge impact on your recruitment results. Which of your recruiting resources are effective? By measuring where your most successful candidates come from, you can continue with this source. You can also note where most of your unsuccessful applicants are coming from and potentially eliminate this source of hire if it continues to fetch through poor candidates.

You will learn over time the best place to post your job openings.

Continuous assessment in recruiting

In order to be successful in the recruitment process, it is important to continuously monitor and assess the process. This not only helps in improving the quality of the candidates but also helps in maintaining a healthy work environment.

The recruitment and selection process is a continuous cycle that starts with the initial screening of resumes, continues with interviews, and ends with hiring decisions. All these steps are done on a continuous basis.

A good way to monitor this process is by using assessment tools like assessments, interviews, and tests. These tools help identify the strengths and weaknesses of candidates so that they can be properly selected for jobs.

Automating your recruitment and selection metrics

Using an applicant tracking system (ATS) can be an effective way to measure your recruitment and selection process.

You should look for an ATS with an integrated analytics feature. This can automate your recruitment and selection metrics, making it easy for you to access and track your results.

By using automated recruitment software you can speed up your recruitment process, improve your quality of hire and much more.

Read more about automated recruitment software here.

Conclusion: How to measure effectiveness of recruitment and selection process

A recruitment and selection process is successful when it meets its objectives such as selecting qualified candidates for the position, managing the candidate pipeline, and minimising turnover rates.

You can improve all these recruitment steps by measuring and evaluating the various metrics we’ve talked about above.

We hope you've found this post on how to measure effectiveness of recruitment and selection process. For similar content check out our post on candidate relationship management software.