5 Crucial Talent Acquisition Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Adrian Dixon

March 31, 2021

An Excerpt of The Rise of Talent Intelligence by Talent Tech Labs Download Banner

What are the most effective talent acquisition metrics HR leaders should be tracking? Increase your team’s accuracy and efficiency while measuring what steps in the acquisition process are succeeding. We’ve outlined some of the most important metrics outlined below.

What are talent acquisition metrics?

Talent acquisition metrics are the standard measurements of success that enable your team to continuously meet your organization’s recruitment goals.

With the goal in mind to find the best candidate for the role, these metrics can help accelerate the recruitment process, with an added bonus of reducing recruitment costs. Consequently, these metrics are a quantifiable tool for evaluating how your organization’s efficiency and accuracy for attracting and retaining top talent.

5 Crucial Talent Acquisition Metrics You Should Be Tracking Hand Pen Graph

As a results-driven talent acquisition leader, here are some of the metrics you should be tracking in 2021:

1. Time to fill

Time to fill: The length of time it takes to fill vacant positions in your company, covering the time a candidate is identified, interviewed, and finally hired.

Time to fill does not have a fixed duration since its dependent on industry. However, the latest Talent Acquisition Benchmarking Report by SHRM revealed that a general average for time to fill is around 36 days.

Improving time to fill has several benefits:

  • Enhanced productivity of hiring managers since they spend less time interviewing potential candidates.
  • Enables your organization to operate at its best in a timely manner. Candidates can lose interest or accept other opportunities during a lengthy hiring process.
  • Quicker hires mean less time spent in transition for existing teams who need that role filled.

On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that only focusing on the speed of the process isn’t enough — you don’t want to sacrifice quality for speed.

2. Time in process step

Time in process step: The amount of time a candidate spends in each hiring process step.

This process can include interviews, phone screenings, submitting the required information to the hiring manager, completing assessments, etc. It is, therefore, important to give time in process step enough diligence and evaluate the different steps of your organization’s hiring process.

By tracking the time in process step, your team can identify bottlenecks in the recruitment process. Ultimately, this helps organizations understand if certain steps in your hiring cycle delay your organization’s staffing needs.

3. Quality of hire

Quality of hire: The contribution new talent has on your organization’s long-term success.

This talent acquisition metric can be measured by considering an employee’s performance, manager satisfaction, internal career progression, and company tenure.

As a qualitative metric, tracking your organization’s quality of hire comes with several benefits:

  • Focusing on obtaining and retaining top talent helps your organization achieve its business goals.
  • Tracking this metric helps you understand the effectiveness of your recruiting methods.
  • Ultimately saves a lot of time and resources in the long run from sourcing to onboarding.

These benefits have led to a surge in the number of companies taking the time to measure their quality of hire.

4. Cost per hire

Cost per hire: Takes into consideration different expenses that are involved in talent acquisition, including travel costs, sourcing costs, relocation costs, agency fees.

A company’s cost per hire can be determined by adding each of these costs and dividing by the total new hires for the year.

As expected, the longer it takes to find the right talent, the more resources and money that are spent. For this reason, cost per hire and time to fill are closely correlated.

Another closely related metric? Cost per vacancy, which is determined by dividing your company’s revenue per employee by the total working days in the year.

5. Offer Acceptance Rate

Offer acceptance rate: Compares the number of candidates who were offered the job and those that have accepted the job.

When an organization’s offer acceptance rate lowers, this prompts the need for deeper analysis. This can help to spot demographic trends, if any.

How to improve this metric:

  • Assess your job descriptions for any unrelated or unnecessary information
  • Reevaluate salaries.
  • What is your corporate culture like and how are you depicting it?
  • What policies do you have for job flexibility and remote work
  • How is your competition attracting talent?

This goes to show how every new hire or lack of one has a direct impact on the entire organization. These five metrics are essential when understanding the performance of your talent acquisition efforts. We’ve also broken down a more comprehensive summary of recruiting metrics here.

Each of these talent acquisition metrics will help you to save time, lower costs, and find the right candidates for the job.