7 Recruitment Analytics to Measure

Data analysis is a coveted skill for HR professionals. The number of HR professionals with data analysis skills has more than doubled over the last 5 years and data-driven talent acquisition has become more important now than ever.

The issue is there is an inexhaustible amount of recruitment analytics you can track. Our advice, focus on what will save you time, energy, or resources. If you overwhelm yourself with analytics they will end up costing you those very things. The necessary data to track might vary slightly based on your industry or the role you are looking to fill, however many metrics are relevant across industries. Here is our list of top recruitment analytics to track in 2021.

1. Applicants per Job Opening

How meticulously are your job postings put together? If so, are you strategizing where you are placing them? Applicants per job opening is easy to track and gives you information on the visibility of your job postings. If people can’t find you, you won’t attract top talent. Include your job posting anywhere that is relevant for you: job sites, social media, and company newsletters are all places to try and reach candidates.

This particular recruiting metric also gives you insight into the effectiveness of your job post. If you have exhausted places to post your job, then it’s time to take a look at the efficacy of the post itself.

2. Application Completion Rate

This recruitment analytic measures the number of people who started an application with you and saw it through to the final submission. Tracking your application completion rate lets you know if you need to adjust the steps in your application process.

Having a 100% completion rate is a lofty goal, and not always the best one. Your application shouldn’t be too overwhelming for candidates, but you may want to provide a unique requirement in your application. This weeds out candidates who are “application dumping” and submitting the exact same application to multiple jobs at once, therefore decreasing your application completion rate. When tracking your applicant completion rate, don’t lose sight of the quality of those completing the application as well as the quantity.

3. Applicant to Interview Ratio

Applicant to Interview Ratio is the percentage of applicants that you decide to move to the interview stage. Tracking this data in your recruiting process will tell you if you need to adjust your job post. Are you attracting the right talent? Is your job posting clear? You may have included too much or too little information. If you are having difficulty with this, consider A/B testing two different job posts. Your applicant-to-interview ratio will show you which is more effective.

Just as with Application Completion Rate, if you have a low percentage here, revisit where you are placing your job posts.

4. Offer Acceptance Rate

Like several others in recruiting, this analytic is straightforward and easy to measure. Offer acceptance rate is the percentage of people you offer a position that actually accepts. In today’s culture, part of a hiring manager’s job is to sell the position and the company to the candidate as much as the candidate is trying to sell themselves.

If you have a low acceptance rate it could be that you aren’t properly pitching the job to candidates. What motivates one person won’t always motivate another. By using Cangrade’s Pre-Hire Assessments before interviewing, you can easily learn a candidate’s motivations and pitch them accordingly.

5. Time-to-hire

This is the amount of time from the moment a candidate completes their application until they accept the job offer. Tracking time to hire will let you know how efficient you are being in the hiring process. You never want to rush hiring a candidate, but you also don’t want to take too long and lose them to the competition. Tracking your current time-to-hire and comparing it to your offer acceptance rate will help you get an idea of what the ideal interview process length is for your organization as a whole, as well as for specific roles.

6. Cost per hire

Many of our recommended recruiting analytics focus on your talent pipeline and saving your organization time and energy. However, cost per hire focuses on how your hiring process affects the bottom line. What resources are you using? If you are having inefficiencies in one of the other analytics mentioned above, are you having to prop it up artificially with a high spend level in some area?

Many HR professionals haven’t properly assessed all of the costs that go into the hiring process. Jen Rifkin, Cangrade’s Director of Customer Success, shared this list of items to include in your analysis:

• Outsourcing costs, if you use an external hiring team at any point of your hiring/onboarding process
• Recruiter salaries, time, and abilities
• Job sourcing costs 
• Career events
• New hire onboarding
• False starts hires
• Hiring software and tools

You don’t have to use minimal resources or have the lowest possible cost per hire. You do need to make sure that the resources being used are providing value in the hiring process. If you spend more money but you are hiring workers who stay with your organization longer or who have a higher level of production, then it may be worth the spend.

7. Employee Success

Initially, this might not seem to fall in the “recruiting” category, but without it, you can’t assess if you have a productive hiring process. You could have a quick and efficient hiring process that pulls in your desired candidates and isn’t expensive. However, if those employees aren’t successful – or if they are, but they don’t stay with your organization – you won’t actually be saving yourself any time or resources.

There are a few things to keep in mind when tracking all of these data points. First, the goal of all data analysis in recruiting is to get the candidates with the best fit into positions in the most efficient way possible. If you are tracking any analytics that don’t expressly serve this purpose, you may be better off removing them. Secondly, you can track all of these metrics but need to be able to analyze the data to make use of them. If you don’t have anyone on your team with the necessary experience to do so, consider partnering with someone who does. Poor data analysis can be worse than no analysis and you may end up damaging your hiring process as opposed to fixing it.

Recruitment analytics can be overwhelming. Contact us today to learn how Cangrade’s AI software can help.