Applicant Tracking Systems are designed to help you keep track of different metrics. Observing your hiring analytics can help you create or improve a recruitment plan that works for you and your company. There are various recruitment metrics you should keep an eye on as you continue your hiring process. Your ATS can help you compile these numbers into understandable reports to make analyzing much easier.
What Recruitment Metrics Should You Track?
Ideally, you’d have eyes on all metrics to help your recruiting strategy. However, some may be more important to your recruitment strategy than others. There are a handful of metrics that you should always have your eyes on to understand how well your hiring plan is working. This will help you decide what changes you need to make to be more successful in recruiting.
Time to Fill
This metric is arguably one of the most important numbers to look at. When it comes to your recruitment strategy, you’ll want to know how long it’s taking for you to fill in a vacancy. This starts from the beginning of the process – the job posting – to the applicant’s acceptance of the position.
The average time to fill for any position is anywhere from 14 to 63 days. This number is dependent on the career field, the position itself, and the recruitment strategy. It’s essential to keep track of this number as many candidates tend to choose organizations that get back to them quickly. If your process is taking too long, the applicant may move on with another company.
Quality of Hire
Of course, you’ll want to fill your vacancies as quickly as possible, but you’ll also want to be sure your candidates are quality hires. This analytic is typically found by taking the percentage of applicants who were accepted, adding that to the percentage of those who have not left the company, and then dividing that number by two.
Your ATS should be able to calculate this number for you, but regardless, this metric is essential to determining if your hiring strategy is strong enough. If you and your team are excelling at hiring talent, but are then struggling to keep said talent, then your strategy may be lacking. Your team may have to adjust your pre-hiring methods to ensure you’re hiring the talent best suited to your company and open positions.
Interview-to-Hire Ratio
This metric is, as the title implies, the ratio of candidates submitted by the recruiters to the number of those who were actually hired. It’s important that you use the data of the applicants who were extended an offer and accepted it rather than those who denied the job offer. The interview-to-offer ratio is another metric that you can use, but for the purpose of seeing how well your strategy works with obtaining talent, this ratio is better.
This number allows you to see how well your team is performing when it comes to selecting talent. If you’re seeing a big number on the interview side, but a way smaller number on the hiring side, this could show that there’s a problem in the selection process. You’ll want to ensure that your team is selecting candidates who not only have the qualifications and skills for the job but also have the characteristics and reliability of a loyal employee.
Offer Acceptance Rate
As previously mentioned, most applicants are looking for a company that responds promptly to their application. If you and your team are taking too long to extend an offer to the candidate, they’ll often end up finding a different vacancy, leading to your offer being rejected. This causes your offer acceptance rate to plummet.
A low acceptance rate could signify that your offers are not competitive enough or are being made too slowly. It can also be indicative of a larger, systematic issue within your hiring process. It’s important to search deeper than the surface-level numbers to figure out why your offers are being rejected continuously. Could this be a company culture issue, or is it strictly your hiring process?
Cost to Fill
This is one that any company needs to keep a close eye on. The cost of hiring encompasses the whole hiring process, from the job posting to the onboarding process. Hiring new talent is not a cheap venture and you’ll want to ensure you aren’t overextending your company’s resources.
This metric should not drive your recruiting process, but it should have an impact on how you move forward. For instance, if your quality of hire is generally high, then you can justify a higher cost to keep and train the top talent in your company. Additionally, if your time-to-fill rate is low, then you’re saving money on allocating resources to fill a vacancy. It’s up to you to take all your metrics into consideration, as well as your company’s budget, to decide where you should put your money.
How Can an ATS Help With Tracking Recruitment Metrics?
There are many features that an ATS can have to help your company analyze your recruitment process’ success. There are built-in dashboards that track the many metrics we mentioned above as well as multiple others. These dashboards make it easier to find these numbers instead of spending time crunching the numbers yourself.
In addition to the built-in ATS features, your ATS can also be integrated with other systems like your CRM or HRIS. This integration can make compiling all the necessary data into one place take only a few minutes rather than hours. Having these tools available to your team can help continuously improve your hiring strategies and recruiting process.