It’s a week before you hit the road for a string of recruiting events and career fairs. The vendors are paid, the swag is organized, the booth is ready for shipping, and your team is prepared. The events will be a success! Or will they? How do you know?
Recruiting without having defined recruiting KPIs (key performance indicators) is like fishing without knowing which bait to use. Imagine going bass fishing and having no clue what type of bait draws them in. You try several different types and hope for the best. The end result?
A lot of time spent drifting around in the boat and coming home with very little. You may get a nibble or two, but who’s to say if it was the bait or another unrelated factor? A smarter way to approach your fishing trip would be to know what type of bait lures your prize more often and effectively. If it is proven that spinnerbaits lure the bass in, it's a no brainer to bring spinnerbaits on your next trip, so the day ends with a basket full of fish.
Recruiting without having established recruiting KPIs is like blindly fishing without a plan; however, incorporating recruiting analytics will help you establish your winning recruiting playbook. It’s easy to over engineer a recruiting analytics dashboard. Decide on a handful of metrics that tangibly move the needle, improve your performance and increase the number of times you hear “great job” from your hiring managers. Consider the following KPIs when crafting the strategy for your organization.
Planning and organizing hiring events and job fairs can be labor intense and takes a particularly detail-oriented recruiter to ensure all the pieces fall into place. You have to think about event logistics, preparation of team members, swag giveaways, candidate outreach, candidate engagement and, not to mention, the plethora of back up plans up you need hidden up your sleeve in the event something or someone falls through.
After all this trouble, how do you know if it was worth the time if you do not measure conversion rates of the event? Calculating hiring event conversion will clearly tell you and your hiring managers if proof was in the pudding.
Recruiting event softwares like Flo Recruit helps recruiters hire better people faster from events and track the highest performing events. Once you know which hiring events perform well, you can continue to invest time and money into those and sunset the ones that prove little value.
While the Hiring Event Conversion metric looks at success per event at a micro level, the Selection Ratio metric gives you a macro level view by comparing success of hiring through events vs. other avenues (job postings, referrals etc.).
Calculating the Selection Ratio is done by simply dividing the number of candidates hired at events by the total number of all candidates that came through the broad pipeline. In this scenario candidates are defined by who you meet and decide to push into the recruiting pipeline.
Let’s say you have a goal to hire 50 professionals in one recruiting season. You have 12 events planned, and you suspect you will meet 1,000 candidates. Most of the time, recruiters are the first level screener before passing the candidate along to the business. It’s important to not let too many unqualified candidates through the recruiting team’s gate for the managers’ review.
Making progress towards a Selection Ratio you and the hiring managers align on as a benchmark not only preserve hiring managers’ valuable time, but also will ensure quality of candidates supersedes meaningless quantity.
Along the same lines of Hiring Event Conversion and Selection Ratio, another way to fine tune your recruiting events strategy is to track the source of hire. Let’s say of the 5 events you attended, you hired several candidates from a few of the events and zero candidates at other events. Using a recruiting events software will help you track the success of each event and tag candidates to the source so you know which sources are most fruitful.
If you know which events yield the highest number of interviewees and hires, you’ll know from which event sources your best candidates come. This data will inform you on where to invest more budget, preventing you from blindly spending money where it may not yield hires.
When considering which recruiting events to attend, cost per hire is one of the most imperative metrics. Not all events yield the same output, and since most recruiters have a finite budget, you want to ensure you are getting the best bang for your buck.
A word of caution: Do not compromise quality for a low cost per hire. Not all events yield the same quality, and there are times when the added cost to obtain a hire may be worth the candidate’s total employee lifetime value.
Recruiting costs include internal costs (labor costs of the recruiting staff, non-labor office expenses) and external costs (job fair/recruiting event expenses, swag, advertising and marketing fees, travel expenses, third party fees).
A candidate’s experience with your brand is instrumental to your recruiting strategy because, as we all know, people talk. If a candidate walks away from your event with a positive sentiment, they are more likely to refer their friends and colleagues to your company.
On the other hand, if they walk away from your event with a bad taste, they could deter others from applying. Candidate NPS (net promoter score) is more important than ever in the age of social media. One negative online review could permanently tarnish your employer brand. Every recruiting team should make it a top priority to ensure every single candidate walks away from your event feeling it was time well spent talking to your company’s representatives, even if they don’t land the job.
Sending a candidate survey via email to everyone you meet at job fairs and hiring events is a great way to collect Candidate NPS data. To get the most honest feedback send the candidate experience survey in the middle of the recruiting process, not just the end, and give candidates an opportunity to share anonymous feedback. By requesting feedback in the middle of the process with many candidates, you will eliminate the possibility of biasing your results by only asking candidates who got the job offer what they thought of the recruitment process.
Just like traditional NPS scoring methodologies, candidate NPS is comprised of asking candidates “How likely are you to recommend [insert your company] as a place to work with your network?” and having them grade on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the highest, 1 the lowest.
A Candidate NPS score could range from -100 to 100. Obviously, the higher the score the better.
Most recruiting workflows consist of several steps. Think of each step like a leg in a relay race. Moving a candidate from leg to leg in a timely manner is essential. The job market is tight, and candidates do not have time to wait on you.
For example, if your candidates are getting backlogged in the manager phone interview stage, you'll notice a drop off in the candidate pipeline at that stage because, while your company was backed up, the candidate was fielding offers from competitors who move faster through the interview process.
If you track the time spent in each workflow, you can pinpoint areas where the process stalls out. As such, you will be able to identify inefficiencies in lagging stages and quickly course correct.
You're close to the finish line, offers have gone out to the candidates from the events you worked so hard on. Unfortunately, the last 7 offers you extended turned out to be a bust. This could be a sign the recruiting process isn’t as compelling as the competition.
You want to track your team’s offer acceptance rate closely to determine the success of your recruiting process. If you see a trend of offer rejections, assess why the offers are being turned down. If you determine 9 of the last 10 offers were turned down because the candidates received other offers for more money, showing your leaders the data will help you fight for more compensation budget.
Another angle to consider when it comes to analyzing Offer Acceptance Rates is there are some events where candidates tend to be more serious about making their final selections while other events are full of casual browsers. Invest in candidates that are serious about your company. Moving a candidate through the entire process is extremely expensive and takes a lot of resources to execute.
A strong offer acceptance rate indicates a strong candidate experience which we already know impacts the Candidate NPS score. Tracking the offer acceptance rate will validate how captivating your hiring team is and how well they represent your employer brand.
Tracking recruiting analytics can strengthen your recruiting program, but over-engineering can also be a pitfall. Don’t let the data consume you because spending too much time crunching the numbers is time away from recruiting and getting in front of candidates.
Alternatively, select a short list of key metrics that directly align to your hiring goals. The metrics you choose should directly impact the problems you are trying to solve and illuminate your efforts to the business. They help you create a data-driven argument when you need to ask for budget, resources and time. It's good practice to choose metrics that correspond to business goals and tangibly measure success.
Keep in mind, once the numbers are calculated you have only just begun. Distilling action items from your analytics is where you'll find the ROI in your recruiting strategy.
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