While tracking recruitment metrics can be viewed as a tedious, time-consuming process, regularly monitoring recruiting metrics is the easiest way to save time and money. It’s easy to ignore metrics and tell yourself that they don’t matter, but they are essential to measuring the overall success of your recruitment and hiring efforts.

Consider the following five key metrics to help you figure out which areas need improvement and where to allocate your resources for optimal results. I’ve also included some tips from RecruitLoop Co-Founder, Paul Slezak, on how you can implement these metrics within your organization.

1. Time to Fill

One of the most important recruiting questions a company can ask is: How long does it take to fill an open position? Although the Time to Fill (TTF) metric can be too broad, Bob Corlett, President and Founder of Staffing Advisors, suggests it measures outcomes in a readily understandable way.

First, you must break down what you’re measuring because it measures the impact of too many different people. It only becomes useful as a way to hold people accountable when you break it down into the components different people directly control:

• Time to Market: The time from when a job opens until it’s advertised in the job market. (Internal approval process is often controlled by Finance and HR.)
• Time for Market to Slate: The time from when a job is marketed or advertised until a reasonable slate of candidates have been developed for the first round of interviews. (Recruiting time is usually under HR’s control.)
• Time from Slate to Hire: The time from when candidates have been identified until a hiring decision has been made. (Interviewing process time is usually under the hiring manager’s control.)
• Time from Hire to Fill: The time from when an offer is accepted until the candidate starts work. (Notice period is usually under the candidate’s control.)

The worst thing you can do is gather all the data you need to calculate TTF, average it together across different jobs and departments, and go compare it to the TTF reported by other organizations. That’s metrics malpractice, Corlett says.

2. Quality of Hire

It’s important to balance recruiting costs with quality, says Jenna Puckett, Associate Technology Analyst at Technology Advice. In order to evaluate recruiting quality, organizations should assess quality aspects such as:

• Productivity: How long did it take them to get up to speed, compared to their peers?
• Tenure: Did they stay at the company shorter or longer than average?
• Scale: Did they grow professionally and get promoted internally?
• Impact: What kind of value (or ROI) did they create for the company?

3. Cost Per Hire

HR professionals consistently rank cost-per-hire as one of the top most helpful metrics in hiring, according to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM). It’s easy to calculate and external sourcing costs such as online job postings, agency fees and relocation costs are easy to track. The formula looks like this:

Cost Per Hire = External Costs + Internal Costs / Total Number of Hires

It’s a popular recruiting metric because it helps link recruitment efforts to cost of savings for an organization and is easily interpreted by those outside of HR, Puckett says. “Cost per hire helps ensure your recruiting efforts are not only feasible for the business, but on par with your industry, size, and location.”

4. Sourcing Channel

It’s important to know where your candidates are coming from. If you’re smart about your recruiting, you will have multiple channels from which you source your potential candidates, Slezak says.  Whether they are referrals, online job boards, passive candidates or your potential employees connected to your LinkedIn career page, every job vacancy needs to know:

• How many applicants came from each source;
• How many qualified applications were garnered from each source;
• Where the short-listed applicants were sourced; and
• Where the successful candidate first heard about the position.

“This information provides insight into the effectiveness of the tools and software you are using and the productivity levels of your recruiters,” says Mary Lorenz, Senior Copywriter for CareerBuilder. “You also gain a better understanding of where your candidates are coming from, which means you can stop wasting time on low-performing outlets and allocate your resources where they will be most effective.”

5. Retention

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Thousands of dollars are spent each year on sourcing and recruiting new employees.  “The costs don’t just come from direct expenses associated with hiring a new person, but also the loss of productivity around the resignation, rehiring and retraining processes,” Slezak says.

Turnover can add up fast, especially for senior level employees. The cost of losing an employee can be as high as three to four times their annual salary, Slezak continues. Retention rates are best looked at from a cross-sectional perspective. What is the turnover rate for a specific role? For example, if a healthcare organization loses two senior employees with a median salary of $120,000 a year, at 400 percent, you are losing $960,000, that’s nearly $1 million—which can be allocated toward other initiatives to improve patient safety and care.

Now that you know which metrics to measure, how do you implement them? Slezak recommends employing a customized software application that gathers data from multiple sources and automatically populates a dashboard with figures and timelines. However, for organizations with a limited budget, a simple excel sheet will do. Set up a consistent schedule to measure the metrics (e.g., every three months at a minimum) and request the information from your hiring managers at the appropriate time.

What are your thoughts? Which recruitment metrics have you measured and improved at your healthcare organization in the last few years?  Please leave us a comment in the section below.