First in HR: Know Your Numbers in Hiring

Just like any other task in today’s business world, hiring people requires one to set goals and then establish metrics to track and monitor your progress. By examining and evaluating your data, you’ll be able to identify activities that are working and those that aren’t. In a marketplace where delays in filling open positions and hiring the wrong person costs thousands of dollars, it’s critical to hire the right person as quickly as possible.

Let’s now identify most essential metrics in today’s hiring process. One convenient and common tool to track hours worked is converting traditional hours and minutes into decimal hours tool. I hope you find this guide handy:

1. Determining the Cost of Hiring New Talent

To hire top performers consistently, you must know how much is spent to source and acquire talent. Once you begin to monitor this, you can figure out ways to simplify, speed up, and improve your recruitment process.

What costs should you consider? Often the cost to screen applications is ignored. It shouldn’t be. Let’s assume that 2 recruiters invest 12 hours each day reviewing resumes and applications. That’s 2 X 12 Hours = 24 Hours at $25 per hour = $600. Then there’s the cost to sponsor ads, the time posting on job boards, time contacting applicants and checking references. Add up all the dollars spent and time-consuming processes and costs pile up.

As you might imagine, this isn’t an exact science. Variables such as the experience of recruiters, automation, and quality of the labor vary from company to company, maybe even department to department. But don’t let that get in the way because understanding these hiring costs are critical for every business.

Of course the costs to hire don’t end after the job offer is accepted. When a new hire doesn’t work out, managers and HR spend countless hours trying to “save” the employee. What’s even worse when the new hire doesn’t show up or quits without notice.

By tracking time to fill and cost to hire, your company can budget and forecast better and begin to recruit faster and hire smarter … and save costs.

2. Tracking the Source of Your Best Hires

Once you know the cost to hire, you can now start the process of refining the quality of hire. One job board may provide you hundreds of applicants but if it takes dozens of hours to find the needle in the haystack, the cost to hire one employee might skyrocket. So it’s not only important to know how many candidates apply through Indeed and CareerBuilder but how many quality hires came from each source. Applicant tracking systems can help facilitate this but spreadsheets work too. Whichever software you use, identify the source, the cost for that source, the number of applications completed and how many converted to top performers.

3. Test and Tweak to Improve Your Numbers

Finally, to get the best hires at the lowest cost in the shortest amount of time, don’t be afraid to test and tweak your processes. Hiring top performers isn’t a once and done task. The labor market and demands of the business are constantly changing. You need to keep the eye on the ball. By mastering the art and science of basic people analytics, you’ll eventually graduate to more advanced analytics and be able to predict instead of react. In time the top quality candidates will begin to rise to the top faster and the number of hiring mistakes will fall.

By putting a hiring system like this in place, you can make significant improvements in your hiring process and also save time and money.

Final Thoughts

The hiring process should not be a mystery. Get your metrics and analytics in order, simplify the process, and watch your hiring successes increase significantly.

Source: OnTheClock