Recruiting

iCIMS’s 10 Must-Track Metrics—Do You Agree?

Purveyor of SaaS talent acquisition solutions, iCIMS, recently issued a white paper designating their Top 10 Must-Track Metrics in Talent Acquisition. Did they get it right?

Here are iCIMS’s top ten:

1. Source of Hire

Once you get a significant amount of data, you can easily see where your new hires are coming from. Especially when broken down by job type or job level, this can help you assess the value of each type of source and allocate resources accordingly. You may also want to measure source against cost and or quality of hire.

A recent iCIMS survey revealed that job boards were the top source for candidates, followed by corporate career sites and employee referrals. However, when asked which source produced the best candidates, employee referrals topped the list, followed by job boards, other, and corporate career sites.

A recent HR Daily Advisor® (HRDA) survey found that the most-commonly-used sources were employee referrals and the company jobsite, followed by job boards. Another HRDA survey found that the most productive sources were “referrals from current employees” and “company job boards” (each with about 47% rating referrals as “most productive or very productive”).


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2. Time to Fill

iCIMS measures this as number of days between opening a requisition and receiving an acceptance from a candidate. Some might choose to measure to start date.

Although this is a very common statistic for HR to maintain, many observers believe that is not a good indicator of HR’s effectiveness, since the amount of time is substantially determined by hiring managers and is often beyond the control of HR.

iCIMS has a slightly different approach to offer as well—measuring the time taken by each stage of the recruiting process:

3. Requisition Stats: Total Applied, Interviewed, Offers Extended, Offers Accepted

Next is the “requisition funnel.” This analysis is very helpful in determining where bottlenecks are.

For example, if you are extending a lot of offers but getting few acceptances, that suggests that the quality of the people interviewing is high, but something is wrong with what you are doing, e.g., your salary offers are too low, there is a competitor who is offering something you don’t. These data may also be segmented out by department, level, hiring manager, etc.

4. Hiring Manager Satisfaction

iCIMS suggests tracking this characteristic through surveys of hiring managers. They suggest using electronic means so that answers are searchable and reportable.

5. Candidate Satisfaction

IT’s also interesting to get the perspective of those who have gone through the hiring process. iCIMS points out that candidates share their job-hunting experiences in social media, so you can’t be blasé about your treatment of applicants. Again, the suggestion is to standardize to an electronic method.


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6. Cost-per-Hire

iCIMS suggests including advertising fees, agency fees, employee referral payouts, travel expenses, relocation expenses, and internal recruiter costs, including time spent screening, and dividing it by the total number of hires.

This metric will generally be more meaningful if broken down by level and/or type. Otherwise, outliers can make the data useless. For example, if there are 20 positions, and two of them are executive level with high search fees and international relocation, and the other 18 are local, supervisory level, the average cost per hire won’t be a very helpful metric.

7. Compliance

There are several aspects to compliance. First of all, there are discrimination and EEO concerns, which may be measured in part by an applicant tracking system. Then there are reporting issues, including payroll, immigration, and state reporting requirements. Software programs may push reminders about these obligations.

Training is, of course, a very important element. Although measuring the impact of training is difficult, you can at least track attendance at training sessions.

In tomorrow’s Advisor, we will present more metrics from iCIMS, plus an introduction to the on demand webinar sponsored by iCIMS, Scaling Up Social Recruiting: Three Steps to Successful Social Media Recruitment.

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