Throughout my career in recruitment, I’ve seen a noticeable shift.
The candidate experience has become paramount, reshaping how we strategize our recruitment efforts. The key to understanding and enhancing this experience? Recruiting metrics!
Without the right metrics to support the strategic changes for improving your candidate experience can be challenging.
So let me walk you through my journey of leveraging recruiting metrics to improve our relationships with candidates and boost our performance indicators.
Decoding quantitative recruiting metrics
When I first started using quantitative metrics like time to hire, time to accept offers, and time per stage, I quickly noticed how they reveal the duration and effectiveness of the hiring process, allowing me to pinpoint areas for improvement.
For instance, I started segmenting time to hire based on candidate categories. This step helped me identify which candidates were more engaged, even if their hiring took a bit longer.
On the other hand, the time taken to accept offers became my go-to metric for understanding how long it took a candidate to accept an offer, either verbally or in written form, from the moment the hiring manager shares the job offer letter.
If you think your hiring stages are too time-consuming, you might want to consider checking your time per stage metric. This data shows the time candidates spend at each stage of the hiring process, helping me identify any bottlenecks and which processes need to be further streamlined.
How to elevate recruitment using qualitative metrics
Embracing qualitative metrics like responsiveness rate, dropouts/rejections, interview participation, offer acceptance rate, and retention has significantly upgraded my hiring strategies.
Responsiveness rate, for instance, opened my eyes to the clarity of our job descriptions and the attractiveness of open positions. Observing metrics like dropouts or rejected candidates and interview participation reveals the appeal of our job vacancies and the effectiveness of our interview preparation materials.
And if only a handful of people are accepting the jobs offered, you’ll know something about the offer or the job posting needs adjusting, which can improve your acceptance rate.
Finally, by tracking retention, I could gauge the effectiveness of our job offer, onboarding process, and the initial months of employment.
Leveraging the power of CNPS
The candidate net promoter score or CNPS has been instrumental in my recruitment journey. It’s offered me valuable insights into a candidate’s experience at each stage of the hiring process and helped me identify potential areas for improvement.
But it’s important to remember that the feedback can sometimes be biased based on how you gather feedback and if you’re only gathering this data from negative experiences.
So make sure to review this metric regularly and at different stages of the hiring process.
In my experience, ensuring a superior candidate experience is the cornerstone of successful recruitment. I’ve found these metrics to be powerful tools in refining my recruitment strategy and celebrating our achievements.
I believe we, as recruiters, have the opportunity to substantially improve the candidate experience, making the hiring process more efficient and enjoyable for job seekers.
Happy recruiting!
