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Why Are Recruiting Metrics Important for Hiring?
According to our strategic hiring survey, 29% of businesses say that a lack of data-driven hiring practices is a major challenge in their recruiting strategy. Recruitment metrics empower you to make more data-driven decisions that optimize your hiring process.
Making the wrong hire can be costly, through lowered performance and the cost of hiring a replacement down the road. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) notes that hiring a new worker costs around 1.25 to 1.4 times the base salary. A slow hiring process can also come at a cost as the role will sit vacant, leading to decreased productivity and an increased burden on other team members.
Recruiting metrics help you understand what’s working well in your recruiting process, and where you could improve to make better hires more efficiently. By tracking and analyzing key metrics, businesses can uncover why hires may not match their needs or stay long-term.
Metrics are only valuable if they’re actionable.
The 12 Key Recruiting Metrics Every Business Should Track
Here are the top recruitment metrics to track when hiring for your business.
1. Time to Hire
Time to hire measures the amount of time it takes to make a hire from the time that the candidate applies for a job to the time that an offer is accepted. A shorter time to hire ensures you secure top talent before competitors. It is typically measured in days, and is relatively easy to track if you’re using an applicant tracking system that records application and offer dates.
How Wizehire helps: Automated workflows and a centralized dashboard streamline hiring steps, helping you reduce delays and hire faster.
2. Cost Per Hire
The cost per hire measures the total cost of recruiting and hiring a new employee. You generally calculate the average total cost per hire by dividing your total recruitment costs for the period by the number of new hires onboarded during the time. You can also track this metric by department, job level, or individual role as well if you maintain detailed spending records.
How Wizehire helps: Access hundreds of customizable job board templates and one-click posting to over 100 boards, optimizing your ad spend and maximizing ROI.
3. Quality of Hire
Quality of hire is a measurement of the value that a new hire brings to the company. High-quality hires are more productive and contribute to long-term business success.
This metric is typically tracked over a longer period, and the exact metrics used may vary based on your industry and how success in the role is measured. It’s typically calculated with a combination of the new employee’s performance metrics, manager satisfaction, and retention rates.
77% of small businesses measure the success of their hiring process by quality of hire.
Source: Wizehire Strategic Hiring Report
How Wizehire helps: DISC+ assessments and Wizehire Coach expertise ensure you attract candidates who align with your role requirements and company culture.
4. Turnover Rate
Your employee turnover rate measures the percentage of employees that leave your company in a given time period (usually a year). High turnover disrupts teams and drives up hiring and training costs.
This metric provides a wealth of insight into your overall work environment and employee satisfaction, but it can also show you whether you’re hiring candidates who are a good culture fit and role fit.
How Wizehire helps: Use our DISC+ personality assessments to identify candidates who are a strong cultural fit, reducing the likelihood of early turnover.
5. Candidate Experience Score
The candidate experience score measures how candidates perceive their application and interview experience with your company. Why does it matter? A positive experience builds your employer brand and attracts top talent. Track this data by surveying people about their candidate experience, including the job application process and communications.
36% of businesses measure their hiring success using candidate experience feedback.
Source: Wizehire Strategic Hiring Report
How Wizehire helps: Streamline communication and scheduling with Wizehire’s built-in messaging tools, ensuring candidates stay informed and engaged throughout the process.
6. Time to Fill
Time to fill measures the time that it takes to make a hire, counted from the date that a job is posted to the date an offer is accepted. Some companies begin the measurement from the date that a job requisition is submitted. Like time to hire, it measures the efficiency of the hiring process. Longer times to fill can lead to operational gaps and increased costs.
How Wizehire helps: With automated candidate tracking and instant notifications, Wizehire keeps your hiring process moving, reducing time to fill.
7. Offer Acceptance Rate
The offer acceptance rate shows what percentage of job offers extended are accepted. This metric provides insight on whether you’re extending offers to candidates who are interested and a good fit. A low acceptance rate may indicate a misalignment between candidate expectations and your offers.
Just 31% of small businesses measure and track their offer acceptance rates.
Source: Wizehire Strategic Hiring Report
How Wizehire helps: Get expert advice from Wizehire Coaches to craft competitive offers that resonate with top candidates.
8. Applicants Per Role
Applicants per role tracks the number of people applying to your roles. It can be calculated as an average across all of your roles for a given time or tracked individually for each job. This metric helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your job postings and sourcing channels.
How Wizehire helps: Industry-specific job templates and 1-click posting to 100+ job boards ensure your ads reach the right audience, driving more qualified applicants to your roles.
9. Source of Hire
This metric tracks where your hired candidates come from. To measure it, maintain a list of where your hired applicants are sourced from (ie. job boards, social media sites, employee referrals). It can help you understand what sourcing channels are most successful for your business, and where you may need to develop your approach more.
How Wizehire helps: Get insights from Wizehire’s reporting tools to see which platforms deliver the best candidates.
10. Application Completion Rate
The application completion rate is the percentage of applicants that start, finish, and submit their application. Low completion rates often indicate that your application is too lengthy or confusing. Consider shortening your application or providing a more intuitive experience for candidates.
How Wizehire helps: Wizehire’s intuitive application process makes it easy for candidates to complete applications, improving your completion rate.
11. Attrition Rate
Attrition is the rate at which employees leave your organization, including through quitting, terminations, layoffs, and retirement. For recruiting purposes, first-year attrition is a popular metric. A high first-year attrition rate often signifies an issue with the selection, hiring, or onboarding processes.
How Wizehire helps: Improve first-year retention by hiring the right candidates with Wizehire’s data-driven insights and onboarding support.
12. Sourcing Channel Effectiveness
Sourcing channel effectiveness measures the efficacy of different sourcing channels by comparing the number of hires to the number of applicants from each source. This helps you allocate resources to the most productive channels. To calculate this metric, divide the total number of applicants from a recruiting channel by the number of hires from that channel.
How Wizehire helps: Wizehire’s platform helps you identify your best-performing channels, so you can focus your efforts where they matter most.
Common Mistakes With Recruitment Metrics and How to Avoid Them
Explore the most common mistakes that companies make when using recruitment metrics.
Mistake #1: Not Collecting Comprehensive Data
Many businesses struggle to maintain accurate recruitment metrics because they’re working with incomplete data. Analyzing and tracking recruitment metrics requires a lot of data, and collecting all that information can be time-consuming if you don’t have the right tools.
The best way to avoid this issue is to use recruiting software to track your metrics. Then, you won’t have to think about manually recording data like application dates or manually calculating your key metrics, and can simply review data-driven reports through your software platform.
“Without accurate, centralized data, it’s nearly impossible to track recruitment metrics effectively.”
– Marisa Ramirez, Director of People Operations
Mistake #2: Only Tracking Company-Wide Metrics
Another mistake is solely looking at the recruitment metrics as a whole. Your company-wide metrics are important, but delving deeper into the data is even more insightful. Drilling down by department is a helpful way to see where things are working well and where issues may be arising.
For instance, if one department has a higher turnover rate among new hires than others, that may indicate potential issues. Maybe you discover the hiring manager isn’t aligned on what they’re looking for in terms of skills and cultural fit. Or perhaps the manager isn’t dedicating enough time to training new hires in the onboarding phase.
“Company-wide metrics provide a big-picture view but can mask issues within specific departments.”
– Marisa Ramirez, Director of People Operations
On the other hand, for example, a team with a higher-than-average offer acceptance rate presents an opportunity for everyone to learn from that process. Perhaps that manager strongly emphasizes the incredible mission and culture of their team in the final interview, causing candidates to align their values with the company and stick around longer.
Mistake #3: Not Using Recruiting Metrics to Inform Your Strategy
Some businesses fall into the habit of tracking recruitment metrics but don’t properly use them to build a larger strategy. It’s important to remember that your recruitment metrics are a reflection of several areas of your hiring process, as well as your business’s overall strategy.
Set aside time at a regular interval—quarterly or annually—for leadership and the HR team to go through the metrics and strategize together. This is a good opportunity to explore issues such as the need for additional recruitment technology, how to build a stronger employer brand to attract candidates, and how to improve interdepartmental collaboration around hiring and onboarding to improve your recruitment metrics for the following period.
How Wizehire Helps You Optimize Recruitment Metrics
Wizehire’s hiring platform can help you optimize your recruiting metrics and improve your overall hiring process. Here’s how.
Tracking Recruiting Data in a Centralized Platform
Wizehire’s applicant tracking system helps you keep all of your applicant data in one centralized platform. You can also manage job offers and onboarding within the system. This allows you to track and manage your recruiting data in one convenient location rather than trying to compile it across different job boards and programs.
Offering Expert Recruiting Support
Get recruitment support from our team of Coaches to address top hiring concerns that may impact your metrics. You can get assistance in improving the quality of your job posts to appeal to candidates and boost your applicants per role, or use our data-driven insights to find top candidates and reduce your time to hire.
Simplifying Candidate Communication
If you’re looking to improve your recruiting metrics, boosting candidate communication processes is an excellent place to start. Slow or disorganized candidate communication can increase your time to hire and bring down candidate experience scores. Wizehire streamlines candidate communication for employers by providing a user-friendly, centralized dashboard to track and respond to candidate texts and emails, to avoid unnecessary delays or missed responses.
Wize Words
Recruiting metrics are more than numbers—they’re the key to hiring smarter and more efficiently. Wizehire simplifies tracking and analyzing these metrics, empowering you to make data-driven decisions that lead to better hires and stronger teams.
Frequently Asked Questions About Recruiting Metrics
A recruiting metric is a data point that measures specific aspects of your hiring process, such as time to hire, cost per hire, or candidate experience. These metrics provide valuable insights to help businesses refine their recruitment strategies, improve efficiency, and make more informed hiring decisions.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) in recruitment are measurable goals tied to your hiring objectives. They go beyond individual metrics to track overall success, like reducing turnover rates or improving offer acceptance rates. KPIs align recruitment efforts with broader business goals, ensuring a strategic approach to hiring.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure your success on strategic goals for recruiting, while metrics measure specific aspects of the recruitment process, such as where applicants are coming from and how many are finishing their applications. Success on these recruiting metrics often contributes to meeting broader KPIs.
A strategic recruiting metric, like quality of hire, evaluates the long-term impact of your hiring decisions. By assessing employee performance, retention, and contributions to business goals, quality of hire helps determine whether your recruitment efforts are delivering lasting value for your organization.
Measuring the performance of recruiters and hiring teams is one use of recruiting metrics. However, it’s important to remember that several factors beyond the recruiter’s performance may impact your recruitment metrics, such as the budgeted salary, the managers from each department that are involved in the selection process, and the recruiting technology available.
If your recruiting metrics reveal challenges with hire quality or efficiency, it’s time to take action. The steps to improve will vary based on your metrics and processes. For example, a low application completion rate might signal the need to streamline your application form, making it quicker and easier for candidates to complete. By addressing these gaps, you’ll create a more efficient hiring process and attract top talent with less friction.
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