Recruiting has the potential to be a major drag on the speed and sophistication of your business.
The more crucial a given hire is, the longer it will take to fill that spot. That can leave you sidelined for months waiting for the right talent to arrive.
Encouraging talent development and having clear career development plans in place both help tremendously. In the end, though, streamlining recruiting is essential, especially for small companies in a growth phase.
The earlier you give attention to your recruiting process, the better!
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Inbound marketing and inbound sales help you bring the right leads to you.
Why not do the same with your recruiting process and entice great candidates?
Inbound recruiting is the process of positioning yourself as an employer of choice so you can get prime talent knocking on your door. It starts by developing a cohesive and continuous strategy for communicating your unique value to your future job applicants.
Once people know why they want to work for you, they’ll start thinking about how to get there.
It works for Google and it can work for you!
Inbound recruiting has a number of terrific advantages, not all obvious. These advantages include the following:
Of course, just as inbound marketing is the inverse of traditional marketing, inbound recruiting is the mirror image of outbound recruiting. That means to master it, you need to become familiar with a new set of recruiting metrics.
It’s important to think of your inbound recruiting as a data-driven endeavor. Every month, your efforts will produce new data that can help you architect an even better process. Likewise, you can learn valuable lessons from every encounter with a candidate – and each successful hire.
Let’s uncover some of the key recruiting metrics you should always monitor in your program:
Time to fill is the time it takes to find and hire a new candidate. It’s usually measured by the number of days between the day your job posting first goes live and when a candidate accepts a job offer. It’s a useful tool to realistically assess opportunities and forecast hiring times.
Time to hire is the elapsed time between the day the candidate is approached and when he or she accepts the job. It’s a measure of how efficient the hiring process itself is. This is a core KPI to link to the productivity and output of your recruitment team.
Back in the day, there were only a few sources for hiring – including the good ol’ newspaper. The sources that attract candidates to your company are now more diverse than ever. This is one of the recruiting metrics essential to the inbound approach, so be sure it’s accurate.
Like qualified leads, qualified candidates are those whose credentials you’ve verified as “best fit,” often through a phone call. Measuring the acceptance rates of qualified candidates gives you a clear barometer of how successful your recruiting is from end to end.
It’s worth saying a few extra words about “quality.” The quality of a candidate is determined by far-ranging factors from cultural fit to productivity. Clarify these by aligning standards of candidate quality with what actually predicts success in the job role.
This is the big one: The number of hires it will take for your recruitment team to reach its current hiring goal. Goals are predetermined based on your overall business strategy. They could be monthly, quarterly, or annual, but shorter reporting timeframes accelerate process improvement.
As recruiting metrics go, cost per hire is the one that really verifies your hiring program is cost-effective. Hiring is a cost center, of course, but you can control those costs by proactively leveraging automation and putting an efficient HR information system in place.
Ultimately, a new hire goes on to a manager – and the relationship between the two of them makes all the difference. With a post-hiring survey, you can capture a hiring manager’s satisfaction level before experience and on-the-job training play their roles, linking back to hiring processes.
On the other end of the scale, measuring the candidate’s job satisfaction early on has two main outcomes. First, it allows you to head off problems that may contribute to turnover later. Second, it enables recruiters to better articulate value and match expectations to reality.
This is among the best recruiting metrics for making your whole hiring strategy more efficient. While a high volume of applicants can mean a job (or company) is especially popular, it often points to an unclear job posting attracting unqualified candidates. Define duties narrowly where you can.
If you have a high volume of qualified candidates but a low offer acceptance rate, you may have a serious problem. Something is turning candidates off: The interview, the coworkers, the office environment, or some piece of your compensation strategy.
Applicant tracking systems (ATSs) are an indispensable component in the drive to abstract away error-prone manual labor. Still, if you require too many steps from job seekers, you’ll damage recruitment. Low completion rates indicate technical difficulties or just plain frustration.
Just like sales and marketing, recruitment has a funnel with specific steps. Once you map out your entire inbound recruiting process, you can recognize where people are getting lost or turning away. For a complete view, start with sourcing and end with the first day of work.
What’s your inbound recruiting secret sauce? Clue us in below!