Talent acquisition metrics are an essential part of data-driven recruitment. They help to assess the performance of your overall talent acquisition process.
In the past few years, talent acquisition has evolved a lot. Today, 70% of the global workforce isn’t hunting for a new job actively. As a result, headhunting & candidate sourcing is getting more complex every passing day.
To overcome this challenge, large and small companies are actively investing in different types of HR software solutions to increase their talent acquisition efficiency as much as possible.
Some companies have even started investing in digital adoption platforms to help their recruitment team proficiently use the applicant tracking system to its fullest extent.
If you don’t know what is a digital adoption platform, here’s a quick explanation:
But even after adopting a digital adoption platform, it is critical to identify & set measurable talent acquisition metrics to track your recruitment strategy's performance easily.
Read on to learn more about talent acquisition metrics.
What are talent acquisition metrics?
Talent acquisition metrics are standard measurements that help to track recruitment success and optimize the talent acquisition process to meet the recruitment goals of your organization.
By tracking the right talent acquisition metrics, you can accelerate the recruitment process, reduce costs, and evaluate your recruitment strategy’s accuracy and efficiency for attracting as well as retaining top talent within your organization.
7 talent acquisition metrics you need to measure in 2024
Now that you know what talent acquisition metrics mean, let’s look at the most important metrics that will matter in 2024.
1. Time to Fill
Time to fill talent acquisition metric refers to the length of time it took to fill individual vacant positions in your organization, starting with the time a candidate is identified until a candidate is hired and filled the vacancy.
This metric does not have a fixed duration and mostly varies depending on the industry. However, the recent talent acquisition benchmarking report revealed that the average time to fill a vacancy is around 36 days.
Although, the speed of time to fill isn’t all that important. But it does have significant benefits such as —
- Improved productivity of hiring managers
- Fewer chances of ideal candidates losing interest due to the lengthy hiring process
- Faster hiring lessens the burden on existing team members who need that vacancy filled
The point is that while the speed of time to fill has its benefits but you shouldn’t compromise the quality of the hire, which brings us to the next point!
2. Quality of Hire
Quality of hire refers to the contribution a new talent has made to the long-term success of your organization.
This particular talent acquisition metric is very crucial to track. It must be measured by monitoring the new hire’s performance, manager satisfaction, career progression within your organization, and total company tenure.
However, it is important to establish a strong employer brand image to attract and retain qualified applicants.
According to an official LinkedIn report, companies with a strong employer brand image witness a 2x faster time to hire and attract 50% more qualified applicants.
On top of this, tracking this talent acquisition metric can offer several benefits to your organization stated as below:
- Helps your organization to achieve long-term goals faster
- Helps to understand the effectiveness of the recruitment strategy of your organization
- Saves your organization a lot of time as well as resources in the long run
Because of these benefits, countless organizations from all over the world have started taking the time to measure this talent acquisition metric more closely compared to other metrics.
3. Time in Process
The third most important talent acquisition metric to start tracking is the time a candidate has to spend in each hiring process stage.
This hiring process can include phone screening, aptitude tests, technical tests, personality tests, communication skill tests, in-person interviews, etc.
To improve your overall recruitment process, it is crucial to evaluate the different hiring process stages in your organization and give sufficient time to each process stage.
By optimizing the hiring process stages allows your recruitment team to identify bottlenecks in your recruitment strategy and eliminate them quickly.
This, in turn, can help your hiring team to realize if certain stages in your hiring process are delaying your organization’s staff needs.
4. Cost per Hire
As the name suggests, cost per hire is measured by taking into account the various expenses that your organization incurred for talent acquisition such as sourcing costs, travel costs, relocation costs, agency fees, etc.
Your organization’s cost per hire can be measured by simply adding each of such costs and dividing by the total number of new hires for a year.
If you think about it, cost per hire and time to fill talent acquisition metrics are quite closely related. The reason is that the longer your recruitment team takes to find the right talent, the more money will be spent, which will increase the overall cost per hire.
5. Hiring Diversity
Hiring diversity is another talent acquisition metric that will matter more in 2024 not only from a legal standpoint.
Having equal opportunity regulations can eliminate discrimination in your recruitment process based on race, creed, caste, religion, gender, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, color, and age.
Besides this, hiring a diverse workforce can have several benefits, ranging from reduced turnover, higher innovation, and increased creativity to a variety of different perspectives and faster problem-solving.
Learn more about unconscious hiring bias that might affect your hiring.
6. Offer Acceptance Rate
This talent acquisition metric is measured by comparing the number of candidates who were offered the job vs. the number of candidates that have accepted the job offers.
If you find that your organization’s offer acceptance rate is low, it is a call for conducting an in-depth analysis of your overall recruitment process & strategy.
The good news is that there are several ways to improve your offer acceptance rate metric within your organization. Some of them include:
- Evaluating your current job descriptions & removing any unnecessary or unrelated information
- Reassessing your job flexibility & remote work policies
- Identifying competitors’ strategies for attracting talent
- Reconsidering salaries
- Performing gap analysis in your workplace culture and how your organization is promoting it
7. Cost of Getting Optimum Productivity Level (OPL)
The cost of getting the optimum productivity level (OPL) metric can be calculated by figuring out the total cost involved in getting the new hires up to speed.
This total cost can include:
- Job posting & advertising
- Recruiter or Agency fees
- Finders fees
- Background checks
- Time spent on candidate screening & interviewing
- Onboarding costs
- Training costs
- And costs of the team manager and members incurred for on-the-job training
Many organizations also take a percentage of the new hire’s salary into account in this total cost until they achieve 100% OPL.
Among all the costs involved, the cost of training can be especially high. But it’s critical to make sure that the new hires are trained fully and reach their full productivity potential as soon as possible.
For this, some companies even hire external trainers to make sure the training is done as effectively as possible to get to the OPL.
Conclusion
As you’ve just learned, measuring each of these talent acquisition metrics can greatly impact the overall performance of your recruitment team.
It can save your organization a lot of time, lower costs, and accelerate the time to find the ideal candidates for the vacant positions in your organization.
