Over the past few months, I have been involved in building a brand new recruiting department. This has been an interesting project and has provided its share of opportunities. However, it has given me the opportunity to reflect on a few things. Mostly, when are recruiters supposed to recruit?

We spend so much time and energy trying to come up with creative ways to show the value add and how to measure the recruiter, along with what reports the recruiter should run, how the recruiter tracks their candidates, that we miss the big picture: when do recruiters have time to source talent?

Some will argue that if you have an applicant tracking system you can limit the amount of manual work the recruiter has to do and more easily pull reports. I agree, however, I am still waiting for the system that can do this. If you put in place an applicant tracking system, you can certainly pull all of the reports and metrics you want, however, how does the candidate get into the system in the first place? In all of the demos I have seen so far, either the candidate has to enter their information through a series of screens (not likely to happen if you are a passive candidate), or the recruiter has to enter the candidate's information manually, (again taking a ton of time away from the job at hand.) Once I see a tracking system that "easily" allows candidate information to be uploaded, I would jump on it. My concern is that with most of the systems, the recruiter becomes a system administrator/data entry clerk, instead of a true headhunter… but I digress.

After careful consideration of a number of options, I believe there are three ways in which a recruiter should be measured, which limits the amount of paperwork and spreadsheets the recruiter has to complete, and gives them the opportunity to do what they do best.

Recruiter metrics: taking stock of your recruiters’ performance

1. Customer feedback. This is essential. No matter what metrics you provide, market data, number of leads, etc, the customer does not care unless you are delivering a candidate. I have seen this a lot with some of the third party search firms with which I work. They provided me a beautiful binder showing me how many calls they had made, how bad the market conditions are for the position, how my company is viewed, and much – and I mean much – more. Although this is all great information, as a hiring manager it was viewed as excuses. Bottom line: we need to deliver the candidate to the customer. As a manager of recruiters, if the customer is satisfied with the process and the hires they are receiving I am satisfied.



2. Candidate feedback: This is another key determination of whether your recruiter is doing a good job. The candidate experience is essential in measuring not only our recruiters, but it helps us develop a more solid employment brand. In addition, the candidate will tell others about their experience and thereby recruit additional talent. It is also important to know how the candidate came to us. If the candidate feedback is that they knew someone inside the company, and the hiring manager did most of the leg work, that does not reflect well on the recruiter. In addition, the recruiter is considered the face of the company. It is extremely important to measure the impression your recruiter makes, and how effective he or she is.



3. Cost per hire. All of the other metrics (time to fill, interviews to hire ratio, leads to interview ratio) are all important, but at the end of the day, we all work for companies that have a bottom line. All of the other pieces are nice to haves, but if you track your lead to interview ratio – which is great – but no one actually goes to orientation, what is the purpose of this metric? This measurement is probably the easiest one to calculate. Take the number of hires for a month and divide it by your total cost. That is it, let's not complicate things.

Sure it is important to know what sources are the most effective in finding talent, but that is easily solved. As a hiring manager, I don't care that you went to a job fair and got 100 candidates if we didn't hire anyone from that fair. Instead of tracking where candidates come from it is more important to track where your hires are from. If 30% of your hires are coming from a certain tactic, I don't care that you only got four candidates from that tactic, the point is we hired them all.

Overall, we need to keep it simple. Break things down in to a simple process and allow our recruiters to actually recruit, versus forcing them in to situations where they need to develop meaningless metrics or excuses.