To hire the best candidates, you need an efficient recruiting process that attracts qualified talent. A recruiting metrics dashboard (or talent dashboard) gathers all your data in one place, helping you pinpoint areas for improvement in your hiring journey.

In this article, we’ll show you why tracking your recruitment metrics is important and how a recruiting dashboard can help. Specifically, we’ll explore the following topics:

  • What are recruitment metrics?
  • What is a recruiting metrics dashboard and what are the benefits?
  • Essential metrics to track on your recruiter dashboard
  • Leveraging the insights of your recruiter metrics

What are Recruitment Metrics?

Recruitment Metrics are measures used to track and optimize your company’s hiring process. Some metrics are percentages (like turnover rate), while others are absolute values (like time to fill). With recruiting metrics, you can:

  • Assess the success of your hiring process in attracting the right candidates
  • Compare your results to industry standards
  • Ensure your hiring process is fair and achieves your diversity and inclusion goals
  • Identify gaps and inefficiencies in your strategies
  • Determine the cost of hiring a new employee

It’s essential to choose metrics that are relevant to your company’s recruitment goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase the diversity of your workforce, you’ll want to track metrics like candidate diversity.

Also, it’s better to focus on a few key metrics than to try to measure them all. Aim to track between 10 and 20 metrics.

Once you’ve chosen your metrics, you can set benchmarks for each one to check your performance. That means recording where you are now and then monitoring your metrics to see if they increase or decrease over time.

Only by understanding where you currently are can you identify areas for improvement. 

What is a Recruiting Metrics Dashboard and What are the Benefits?

A recruiting metrics dashboard (also known as a hiring dashboard or talent acquisition dashboard) is a visual tool for tracking and analyzing your hiring metrics. It gathers your data into a single source of truth, which gives you the following benefits:

  • You can identify trends in your data to help you improve the candidate experience
  • Having all your data in one place saves time and increases your productivity
  • You have instant access to a range of insights to make better hiring decisions
  • You’ll have a clear picture of your hiring funnel, helping you identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies

With the help of a recruitment metrics dashboard, you can create a data-driven hiring process that helps you attract and keep the best talent for your business.

Essential Metrics to Track on Your Recruiter Dashboard

You can customize your recruitment dashboard according to your chosen metrics. But there are certain metrics it’s essential to track no matter which industry you’re in. These are:

  • Time to fill 
  • Candidate diversity 
  • Source of hire 
  • Quality of hire 
  • Turnover rate 
  • Applicants per position 
  • Cost per hire
  • Offer acceptance rate

1. Time to fill

This metric measures how long it takes to source and hire a candidate. It starts the day you advertise the position and ends when the candidate accepts an offer (or starts their new role).

Your time to fill depends on the speed and efficiency of your recruitment department and the demand for a particular role. In general, the shorter the time to fill, the more efficient and cost-effective your recruitment process is.

Some roles naturally take longer to fill, though一for instance, if they need specialist skills or a more rigorous assessment. So, take this into account when you interpret this metric.

2. Candidate diversity 

Diversity in recruiting is essential, so tracking your candidate diversity metrics is crucial. These include:

  • Candidate demographics: Age, gender, ethnic background, sexual orientation, etc.
  • Outreach effectiveness: How many diverse candidates do your sourcing strategies reach for a role
  • Funnel effectiveness: How many diverse candidates convert at each stage of your hiring funnel
  • Candidate experience: How satisfied diverse candidates are with your recruitment process compared to other candidates
  • Candidate retention: How many diverse candidates stay with your organization for one year or more

To measure candidate diversity, you can gather feedback through surveys and interviews.

You could also use a tool like Oleeo’s Diversity Insights datasheet. This provides pre-built metrics and analytics to help you check diversity in your recruiting. It also gives insights into how to achieve your company’s diversity goals.

3. Source of hire

This shows which channels your candidates come from, such as social media, job boards, paid advertising, sourcing tools, or your website.

By monitoring your source of hire, you can see how many qualified candidates each of your channels brings. You can also calculate the ROI of each channel. This helps you identify your most effective channels.

If a particular channel is underperforming, you can cut it from your recruiting strategy and divert the funds to more profitable channels.

4. Quality of hire

This metric measures a candidate’s performance and adjustment to your company, usually within their first year. To calculate it, you must first decide which indicators to use to measure quality. Common indicators are:

  • Job performance
  • Cultural fit
  • Ramp time
  • Engagement

Next, score each factor on a scale of one to 100 (with 100 being the best). Finally, plug these numbers into the following formula:

Quality of hire = (Job performance score + Cultural fit score + Ramp time score + Engagement score) / Number of indicators

For example, say a candidate had the following scores:

  • Job performance: 50
  • Cultural fit: 65
  • Ramp time: 40
  • Engagement: 50

Your quality of hire would be (50 + 65 + 40 + 50) / 4 = 51%, which indicates room for improvement.

It’s important to track your quality of hire, as poor hiring decisions can cause low productivity and high turnover. If your quality of hire is consistently low, you may need to rethink your recruitment process.

5. Turnover rate

This measures the number of employees that turn over each year. Turnover is a result of resignation, termination, job abandonment, etc. You can calculate your turnover rate with the following formula: 

Turnover rate = (Number of employees who turned over / Total number of employees) x 100

If five out of your 50 employees turned over during their first year, your turnover rate would be (5 / 50) x 100 = 10%.

You can also break down your turnover rate into voluntary (resignation) or involuntary (termination). Plus, you could analyze turnover rate by department, hiring manager, time of year, etc.

It’s costly to replace lost talent, so tracking your turnover rate and taking steps to reduce it is vital. For instance, you could use Recruiting Software to automate and streamline your recruitment process. This ensures candidates have a great first experience with your company.

6. Applicants per position

This shows the number of applicants a particular position attracts. It helps you determine interest in a role. Plus, you can pair it with data like applicant location and demographics to get a clearer picture of your candidate base.

Lots of applicants per position can mean a job is popular. But it can also suggest a problem with your job description.

If most of your applicants are unsuitable for a role, you may need to make your job description more specific. This will save time on screening without reducing the number of qualified candidates.

7. Cost per hire 

This is the amount it costs you to hire a candidate. It includes both internal and external costs.

Internal costs: External costs:
  • Recruiter salaries
  • Employee referral bonuses
  • Interview costs
  • Infrastructure costs, such as office rental
  • Recruitment agency
  • Paid advertising
  • Software tools
  • Event costs
  • Candidate travel costs or bonuses

You can calculate your cost per hire using this formula:

Cost per hire = Total costs (internal + external) / Total number of hires

You can compare your cost to hire against others in your industry. This can show if you’re spending too little, too much, or about the right amount. You can also break down your costs to see if you can reduce spending in any areas (as long as it doesn’t affect the candidate experience).

8. Offer acceptance rate

This metric lets you track the number of candidates who accept an offer compared to the number who receive an offer. The formula is:

Offer acceptance rate = (Number of offers accepted / Total number of offers) x 100

For instance, if 20 out of 30 candidates accepted offers, your offer acceptance rate (OAR) would be (20 / 30) x 100 = 67%.

Ideally, you want an OAR of 90% or more. A low OAR could mean your job offer isn’t attractive enough or your hiring process isn’t clear enough. To improve it, you can try the following:

  • Make sure your job offers match (or exceed) those of your competitors
  • Ask candidates during interviews if there are any issues they want to discuss
  • Clearly communicate job responsibilities, company culture, etc.
  • Introduce candidates to your team to ensure they’re a good fit

Leveraging the Insights of Your Recruiter Metrics

To leverage the insights of your recruiter metrics, you need a way to analyze them. For instance, Oleeo’s recruitment reporting software comes with pre-built metrics and analytics to help you identify trends and optimize your recruitment processes. 

Below are some of the ways you can use your recruitment metrics to improve your hiring strategy.

Improve retention

By tracking recruiting metrics like turnover rate, you can identify issues that harm retention and take steps to address them. You can also measure the success of your changes.

For example, you may find that candidates turn over because they don’t understand what a job entails. You can then increase the transparency of your recruitment process and track the impact on retention.

Identify bottlenecks

By mapping metrics like time to fill onto your hiring journey, you can identify bottlenecks and pain points. You can also identify who these bottlenecks affect and find ways to streamline your processes.

For instance, if your screening process is the cause of a long time to fill, you can work with your recruiters to improve it.

Improve efficiency

You can compare metrics like time to fill and cost per hire against industry benchmarks to check the efficiency of your hiring process. If there are inefficiencies, you can look at how to tackle them.

For example, if your cost per hire is above average, you can analyze your costs to pinpoint cost-saving opportunities. 

Identify trends

Analyzing your recruitment metrics helps you identify trends in candidate behavior, like preferred sourcing channels or common reasons for turnover. You can use this information to better target your hiring strategies and improve the candidate experience. 

Demonstrate value 

Your metrics are also a great way to demonstrate the value of your recruitment efforts to stakeholders.

For instance, you can use cost per hire and quality of hire to calculate your recruitment ROI. And your candidate diversity recruiting metrics are a great way to highlight how you’re achieving your diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals.

Increase revenue

Finally, tracking your metrics helps you increase your company’s revenue by ensuring you only hire high-quality, productive candidates. Plus, you can optimize your spending to ensure you’re only investing in the areas that deliver value. 

Embrace Data-driven Recruitment Strategies with Oleeo

A recruiting metrics dashboard is a vital tool for improving your hiring processes and realizing value. And, with talent acquisition software from Oleeo, you’ll get all this and more.

Oleeo’s software comes with detailed reporting and analytics to give you insights into your entire recruitment process. With Oleeo, you can:

  • Report on key metrics at each step of the hiring funnel
  • Keep data secure and compliant
  • Inform key business decisions
  • Optimize and streamline your recruitment strategies
  • Track results in real-time
  • Add to your data with seamless integrations

Oleeo helps you manage and streamline every aspect of your recruitment process with software to manage events, applicant tracking, and candidate relationships. Book a Consultation and see what we can do for you.