5 Key Hiring Metrics for 2013

With 2013 fast approaching, many of us will be using the traditionally quieter hiring month of December to take stock of the key industry developments and market trends of 2012 in order to refine our strategic approaches accordingly for 2013. These refinements may include a change in strategy, tactics or processes or it could involve the adoption of new cutting edge technologies.

Evidence does indeed suggest that the sands are shifting in the HR world, and I thought it would be a good time to take another look at the hiring metrics that we are using to check the relevancy of them going forwards and to see if any new metrics need to be brought into play or further examined.

1. Source of hire; With there being so many different methods for hiring staff emerging on to the market, such as employee referrals, gamification and crowd-sourcing,  it is more important than ever that you tracksource of hire to understand your most effective hiring channels and to establish whether key sourcing channels are being underutilized. Additionally, the recent shift toward more performance based or CPC job posting systems such as Indeed and SimplyHired allow a better understanding of total cost per applicant and cost per hire.

2. Cost. An oldie but still goodie. With the OECD having just slashed its global economic growth forecasts, the threat of recession still looms over many major economies, which means hiring teams will need to be able to demonstrate cost-effectiveness very clearly next year. There should clearly be some emphasis on the following metrics in 2013.

• Cost per hire
• Cost per hire as a percentage of average starting salary
• Cost of vacancy and money saved by reducing time to fill
• Revenue or productivity increase due to successful hire

3. Employee Referral rates

We have written extensively about just how influential employee referrals are becoming as a source of hire, with surveys from Jobvite, CareerXRoads and others all showing that employee referrals are the most influential form of hire a the moment. As well as this, the Jobvite survey has shown that referred employees are hired quicker and stay longer than employees hired through most other channels, which means that in theory increasing your emphasis on referrals may reducetime to fill and empty desk time. For all these reasons, we expect this employee referrals trend to strengthen in 2013,  as social recruiting technologies like Mesh-hire and Jobvite begin to take hold.

Hiring teams should clearly be placing emphasis on tracking referral rates versus other sources of hire to see if they are fully utilizing what is currently thought to be the most effective form of hire.

4. Quality of hire

We reported recently on a study by Futurestep which found that hiring metrics are beginning to shift their emphasis to more sophisticated analysis. The most important metric of all was ‘performance of new hire’, followed by ‘new hire retention’, with the traditional metrics of cost to hire and time to hire being considered of lesser importance.

There is no doubt that in 2013 ‘quality of hire’ should really be the primary metric that hiring professionals are using to effectively manage the performance of their function.

5. Pipeline of talent

With an increasing focus on talent communities and strategies to engage with passive talent, (who are thought to be the lion’s share of the candidate market), employers should be developing actionable pipelines of quality prospects who can be reached out to at future times of need. You should be consistently assessing the size and quality of the prospects in your pipeline and the number of people that you actually recruit from the talent pipeline you have engineered. Is all the effort you are putting into talent communities, passive talent engagement etc… turning into results?

I’d be interested in hearing about any more hiring metrics that you think will be crucial for 2013.