Rise of the New Metrics

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stage lightsYou’re sitting in a darkened theater. The curtain rises. You hear the announcer’s voice:

Once, time to hire was good enough. It is, no longer. Welcome, to the RISE of the New Recruiting Metrics .

Okay, okay, only if you’re sitting in the nerdiest theater ever. but the truth is, there is a shift happening on the metrics scene, as it were. As recruiting technology gets ever more sophisticated and even more granular measurements are revealed with every new iteration, the subtle movement from time honored metrics to newer, perhaps more accurate measurements in our industry marches on.

From time to hire to hiring velocity-Time to hire matters, it’s true. But as Jobscore CEO Dan Arkind points out, it’s not as transparent as it could be as a metric (say THAT five times fast). Arkind has built velocity into his reports and metrics dashboard for this very reason, but even before that, it was built into his processes as a recruiter. “We still show time to hire and source of hire, but the truth is, we encourage our clients to look at velocity,” says Arkind. Velocity, is how quickly the recruiting process moves from place to place. Or, from person to person. Velocity as a measurement within recruiting technology dashboards allows management to see where the bottlenecks are in the process and provides insights on team members that may not be puling their weight.

From quality of hire to retention- Jason Lauritsen of BulletProof Talent has been banging the drum for six months on the shaky merits of the quality of metric, sometimes to the chagrin of his fellow colleagues. In Human Resources, fewer metrics are more time honored than measuring recruiting by quality of hire. How will HR measure the job a recruiter does if not by this standard? But Lauritsen disagrees, likening the recruiter to the real estate agent…

Recruiters facilitate a process. We don’t make hiring decisions (at least not in most cases), so why is it that we keep accepting responsibility for the quality of hire within our organizations? If the hiring manager is making the hiring decision, they are responsible for the outcome of that decision. Quality of hire is not a measure of recruitment effectiveness. It’s a measure of the effectiveness of the hiring decision.

From cost per hire to source of hire- Mmmm, cost per hire. Operations loves this one, which is called to the carpet whenever a new system is being taken through the paces in purchase consideration. But is it accurate any longer? Some say no. As Jobs2Web’s Doug Berg mentioned during his presentation at the Recruiting Innovation Summit, it’s getting ever more difficult to discover precisely WHERE a candidate comes from, making it harder to determine exact cost of hire. And if you aren’t sure whether someone was a referral via facebook or came to your career site via a twitter posting, how can you know which of your social or traditional recruiting methods are working? Firms like OptiJob, Universum, and J2W (SuccessFactors now? SAP?) all help companies measure from whence their candidates came (although not all the way through the internal hiring system in many cases) hoping to give more solid numbers to the ever-popular social recruiting claims.

What metrics are you seeing fall by the wayside in your own organization? Do the tools and technology you are using within your company allow you to disdain the metrics mentioned above or are they still a solid part of your measurement arsenal?

By Maren Hogan