In the past, recruiters relied on their intuition to strategize and hire top talent. But, today’s recruiters find themselves in a highly competitive, fast-paced digital landscape — and, in order to excel, they must track and analyze important metrics to inform their decision-making processes.
Most recruiters have begun to embrace a data-driven mindset — but many make the mistake of relying on the wrong metrics. More specifically, they choose to collect data that reflects well on their performance but doesn’t paint the full picture of their recruiting successes and failures. In other words, they fill their reports with vanity metrics.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, today’s blog post is for you. We’ll explain the most common vanity metrics in recruiting and provide you with more valuable alternatives. Let’s get into it!
What Are Vanity Metrics?
Vanity metrics are surface-level metrics that don’t offer any actionable insight or help you to reach your recruiting goals. These metrics can be easily manipulated or altered to appear positive without accurately reflecting a recruiter’s performance.
When recruiters focus on vanity metrics, they shield themselves from criticism but ultimately hide important recruiting analytics that can improve hiring processes. To put it simply, vanity metrics may look good in a report, but they don’t offer any real value or substance.
Now, let’s look at some specific vanity metrics that recruiters often rely on. Keep reading!
1. Number of Applicants
Recruiters and HR managers tend to overvalue the number of applications they receive for any given position. Conventional wisdom says if an open job receives a significant amount of applicants, the recruiter has done their job well. However, the total number of applications tells you very little about recruiting effectiveness.
A recruiter’s goal isn’t to attract the most applicants — but to attract the most qualified applicants. If you receive many applications from unqualified candidates, you’ll actually be less productive, as you’ll waste time with unqualified applicants.
Instead, we recommend you track the percentage of qualified candidates. A qualified candidate meets your requirements for the role and is moved along to the next stage of the hiring process. Unlike the total number of applicants, qualified candidate rates tell you how effective and targeted each sourcing channel is.
[Related: 5 Interview Questions to Get Quality Candidates in the Pipeline ASAP!]
2. Total Number of Hires
Of course, the total number of candidates a recruiter hires or places in a position is an important metric. But, it doesn’t even come close to telling the full story of a recruiter’s performance. Consider the following scenario:
Recruiter #1 sourced 25 candidates who were eventually hired over the last year. Recruiter #2 only sourced 18 hires over the same period of time.
You may look at these figures and determine that Recruiter #1 was more successful. But, what if five of those hires ended up being low-quality hires or leave the company within a year — while all of Recruiter #2’s hires turned out to be high performers?
As you can see, total number of hires can be a misleading metric if you don’t combine it with more performance-based metrics. Quality-of-hire, although it’s a more difficult metric to report, is a good indicator of recruiting success. To measure quality-of-hire, keep a close eye on performance reviews and team feedback for the first year after a new hire joins the team.
3. Website Traffic
Website traffic is a common vanity metric for marketers, and the same goes for recruiters. A spike in traffic to your careers page may seem like a good sign on the surface, but a basic look at website traffic can be misleading.
For instance, let’s say a specific listing draws a large number of visitors, but only a few of those visitors submit an application. This is a sign that you may be targeting the wrong audience with your recruiting efforts — but you wouldn’t know it if you only looked at raw web traffic. For this reason, it’s important to track your visitor-to-applicant conversion rate for a more accurate representation of performance.
[Related: Talent Analytics 101: How to Interpret Your Data in 2018]
4. Total Number of Messages Sent Per Day
A recruiter might send the most emails and InMail messages, and make the most calls every day — but that doesn’t mean they are the most productive member of their team. Think about it: if you send 100 messages every day, but only one percent generate a response, then your outreach efforts were inefficient. But, a manager might glance at these numbers in a report and consider you to be an incredibly productive recruiter.
Candidate response rate is a far more actionable metric as it can help recruiters identify their most effective sourcing channels and improve their sourcing techniques for more productive outreach.
5. Time-to-Fill
Time-to-fill refers to the time between the posting of a job and the hiring of a candidate. On its own time-to-fill isn’t very helpful. Of course—when combined with other actionable recruiting metrics, it becomes more valuable. For example, recruiters can leverage average time-to-fill data to predict how long it will take to fill an upcoming position.
But, time-to-fill becomes a vanity metric when used simply as a performance indicator. Here’s what we mean—let’s say it takes you 40 days to fill a marketing specialist role, which is 10 days less than your average. This figure might seem to indicate an improved, seamless recruiting process. But what if the new hire performs poorly in the role? Did your business benefit simply because you were able to hire someone quickly? The answer is obvious.
Continue to track time-to-fill for the sake of planning and preparation, but don’t use it as the sole indicator of efficient recruiting performance. And, above all else, don’t hire a candidate too quickly for the sake of improving time-to-fill.
[Related: How to Balance Time and Candidate Quality In Your Interview Process]
Key Takeaways
We understand why vanity metrics are popular — they’re simple, easy to collect and often make your recruiting efforts seem more successful than they are. But ask yourself: Would you rather have an effective recruiting strategy, or one that simply looks effective?
Sure, more specific metrics often expose flaws in your recruiting efforts. But, identifying areas that need improvement isn’t a bad thing. Rather, it’s essential to improving your candidate sourcing strategy.
Sam Holzman is a Content Marketing Specialist at ZoomInfo where he writes for their sales and marketing blog. ZoomInfo is a leading business information company that helps organizations accelerate growth and profitability. Sam regularly covers topics related to sales, marketing and recruiting, and likes to write about sports and travel in his free time.
