Recruiting Metrics You Should Be Tracking: Retention

Recruiting Metrics Retention

Employee retention and why it matters to agency recruiters.

Ideally, every candidate you place for a client would be the perfect fit. Staying with the client’s company for a decade, driving growth, and thrilled to be part of the team. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. After all, if candidates weren’t occasionally interested in leaving their job, recruiting and staffing would be a dead industry.

So, how can you be sure that you are placing candidates with the best chance of being happy and contributing major value to your client?

In this series of blog posts, we’re examining several recruiting metrics and TA metrics that every recruiting and staffing firm should know and/or report on internally to drive success. The previous blog post focused on your firm’s offer acceptance rate; this time, we’ll focus on measuring and analyzing retention.

Measuring Retention Rates

Measuring the retention of placed candidates answers the question, “How many of our placements are staying with a company over a set period?” While many factors can influence retention, this measurement can provide recruiters a good look at how well the candidates they placed fit within their new organization. 

Overall retention rate is calculated by dividing the current number of employed individuals by the number of employees at the start of your measurement period, multiplied by 100. You are free to choose the length of your measurement period, but many organizations opt to do this annually.

Measuring retention can require significant human intervention because you may not be the library of the data. However, for your personal records, you can take notes in Crelate when a candidate leaves a company, and then automatically trigger surveys to these contacts to understand their sentiment towards the experience.

By employing surveys to clients and candidates, you can gather information like their reasons for leaving, and what they liked and disliked about their job(s) within the organization. Developing a consistent follow-up survey program can bring you information about your customer experience with both candidates and clients. It can also reveal what might need to be adjusted or improved to boost retention.

The Importance of Retention Rates

Although it may seem obvious, retention can be a critical factor in employee turnover for your clients. Employee turnover is expensive for any business. That’s why it’s important to ensure that the candidates you place are the right fit and will stay with the company for the long term. This goes a long way toward maintaining a strong relationship with your clients and developing returning business. 

The effect of retention on your clients is what makes this metric more of a challenge to measure and improve. Many times, the information you received from your clients about a position might change after the hire because they learned more about an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes, in the worst-case scenario, these new changes might drive your candidate to look for another job. Retention is a metric that represents a balancing act between your clients and candidates, and it requires you to make sure you’ve researched both parties to learn their needs and requirements.

Boosting Candidate Retention Rates

Many of the factors that influence retention are on the client side of the equation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to increase retention yourself. While things like culture and continuing education are offerings your client must address, you can increase retention by managing expectations and maintaining full transparency with candidates. There’s no use in trying to hide the unfavorable parts of a job. Share the good, the bad, and the ugly so candidates know what they’re getting themselves into. Your retention rates will go up when candidates have a clear understanding of a job’s requirements.

On your end, making sure you represent the positions and their requirements accurately helps reduce turnover. If candidates are placed in a position that is vastly different from the expectations you’ve built, they may leave that company sooner for greener pastures. Retention is one of the harder metrics to improve as it has a lot to do with your clients’ culture and other intangibles outside of the placement process.

If you need software solutions to track, analyze, and improve your KPIs, ATS, and CRM solutions from Crelate are the right tool for the job. Get in touch and see how our offerings can help your firm succeed.

Filed under: Recruiting Tips