Recruitment is always a big investment. And like any other investment, it’s best to track the results your recruitment strategy brings to your organization, so you can dedicate efforts and resources towards the right places.
As a recruitment agency in Singapore, we believe that without the right metrics to track the performance of your recruiting strategy, it would be tough to determine the ROI your company derives from your recruitment strategy. To measure the effectiveness of your recruiting strategy, you need to understand the important metrics that provide useful data and insights on your recruiting strategy. Let’s look at some of the most important KPIs to track.
1. Qualified Candidates Per Opening
When your job listing attracts hundreds of candidates, you have a better chance of getting the right candidate for the position. But there's a catch, these candidates have to be high-quality candidates who meet the requirements.
If not, you are wasting your time and resources. A job listing that attracts the wrong candidates could mean:
A. Your job description fails to describe the ideal candidate adequately
B. You have unrealistic expectations about the candidate you are trying to hire
C. You posted the job listing in the wrong places
A good way to track the number of qualified candidates per posting is to find the ratio of qualified candidates from the total number of candidates. The candidates who are worth taking to the next step of the recruiting process where you can call or engage them.
If you have a low ratio of qualified candidates, you can use these tips to increase the chances of attracting high-quality tech talent to your organization:
A. Identify the sources that bring the higher number of qualified candidates and focus on those
B. Evaluate your sourcing strategy to determine whether your job description reflects the job role for which you are hiring
C. Optimize your job description to attract the ideal candidate
D. Review your recruiting budget and ensure you spend it in the most effective candidate sourcing channels
E. Highlight your company culture in the job description
2. Application Completion Rate
The application completion rate helps you determine the complexity of your application process by calculating the number of candidates who open a job application, and those who eventually submit the application for consideration. If many candidates abandon the application process, you are leaving top talent on the table. A high abandonment rate is often a sign that you need to improve.
3. Source Quality
When recruiting IT talent, it pays to ensure every step you take pays off, especially when recruiting from different sources. Most IT recruiters in Singapore use professional job boards, LinkedIn and other professional communities, or referrals to source IT talent.
Evaluating the quality of these sources helps you determine the best place to look for certain candidates and the sources that do not bring in the expected quality of candidates.
To determine the source quality, calculate the number of high quality coming from every source. High-quality candidates are those that get the furthest in your recruitment process and those that you hire for the job.
Another way to determine the source quality is to look for patterns. For example, if most of your best candidates come from referrals, then it makes sense to invest more in your referral program.
4. Time to Hire
Time to hire refers to the time it takes from the moment a candidate applies to the time they accept a job offer. Measuring the time to hire for your organization will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your recruiting process.
Before you measure the time to hire, you must understand the average time it takes to hire candidates for different roles. Hiring a C-Level executive takes longer than it would when hiring for an entry-level position. You can break down the recruitment process into several stages including application and CV screening, phone interview, in-person interview, on-boarding, etc., to determine the time it takes the average candidate to move from one step to the next.
When you calculate the time to hire, you can effectively plan future recruitment activities and fix the existing gaps in your recruitment process.
5. Interviews to Hire
Interviewing is a critical but time-consuming part of the recruitment process. It defines the number of candidates you interview before finding the right candidate. The ratio of your interview to hire ratio tells you about the efficiency of your recruiting process. It’s not a good sign for your company when you interview too many people to fill a position. A good interview-to-hire ratio is 3:1.
Improving candidate experience has also become important especially for tech companies, which have to compete for candidates from a limited talent pool. The candidate experience you provide applicants influences the candidate satisfaction, their perception of your employer brand, the job acceptance rate, and the turnover rate. You can send out surveys to applicants asking them to review their experience with the organization. The candidate survey should include questions that evaluate each stage of the recruitment process.
6. Quality of Hire
Employees are the lifeline of your organization. Therefore, you must hire the right candidates who will drive your business forward. Hiring the right candidate depends on having an optimized IT recruiting strategy that helps you make smarter hiring decisions.
The quality of hire is; therefore, one metric you should always measure to test the effectiveness of your recruiting strategy. The quality of hire is the value a new hire brings to the company. You can measure the quality of hire through the employee’s performance and tenure.
Quality hires bring several benefits to your organization, including:
A. Higher employee retention rates
B. Reduced turnover costs
C. Increased employee productivity
D. Higher job satisfaction
By measuring the quality of hire, you can identify the current gaps and set goals towards improving your recruitment process to attract high-quality employees. Some of the steps to improve your quality of hire include:
A. Work with hiring managers in defining the role and the ideal candidate
B. Provide an accurate description of the role
C. Collect the right pre-hire and post-hire data to help you make data-backed decisions
D. Take advantage of artificial intelligence by using applying it in the recruiting process
E. Assess how the candidate fits with the organization’s culture
F. Eliminate common hiring biases to keep your hiring process objective. The common hiring biases include confirmation bias, heuristics, and expectation anchor bias.
G. Improve your onboarding process to make it positive for the new hires
H. Review your results regularly and improve on the weaknesses
7. Offer Acceptance Rate
The offer acceptance rate tells you the number of candidates who accept the job offer you extend. The offer acceptance rate is an indication of the recruitment team in filling the candidate pipeline. It also indicates that your company's screening, interviewing, and candidate experience has worked so far in finding the right candidates for the organization.
If your organization’s offer acceptance rate is on the lower side, these steps will help you improve the metric:
A. Review your compensation package to reflect what the industry offers (align the salary expectations early on in the recruiting process)
B. Shorten the time to hire process (some candidates will take a job offer from another company because they extended the offer first)
C. Improve your employer branding to attract more candidates
D. Streamline your recruitment process so that you reach out to the ideal candidates who are the right fit for the role and your company
E. Present a strong offer; call the candidate with the news of the offer, ask about their reservations, negotiate as needed, and follow up with a formal offer letter with details of the job, the salary expectations. Reach out if the candidate does not respond.
Recruiting talent is hard enough for companies in Singapore, thanks to the rapid growth of the industry and the talent gap in the market. A poor recruiting strategy makes it even harder to recruit and retain the right talent in your organization. Should you need help to recruit the best talents, you might want to drop an enquiry with BGC Group.
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