Data Watch

Recruiting Tops HR Evaluation Criteria

A majority of HR departments are involved in their companies' key strategic business decisions, according to new research by Kennedy Information’s parent company, the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. This fact probably bears on Human Resource (HR) departments' top three priorities for 2007, which, the report finds, are recruitment and retention, strategic planning and management, and cost containment. These closely match with top criteria HR executives use to evaluate their teams.

A section of the report, HR Department Benchmarks and Analysis 2007, looks at the criteria HR executives use to evaluate performance. Nearly half of HR executives consider recruitment and retention to be the most important criteria for evaluating an HR department's performance. Another 36% see strategic partnering as the most important, and 28% consider it to be cost containment. At the bottom of the list, and barely registering consideration, is external customer satisfaction and retention. HR executives at companies of all sizes, in fact, consistently cite the same top evaluation criteria, which also happen to mirror the top priorities of HR departments in 2007.

The report’s findings reflect data from 550 participants, all human resource executives or managers. Respondents were from firms employing a workforce of at least 25. The findings help HR departments to benchmark their own measurement methods against those for the entire industry, as well as individual industry sectors.

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