22 Key And Advanced Recruiting Metrics
We in recruitment can access a previously unseen granularity of data. But, with so many things to keep track of and optimize, how do you decide which recruiting metrics to focus on?
To help, in this article, I’ve split the recruitment metrics into what I consider “key” and “advanced”.
Key metrics are what I keep track of regularly and what I recommend non-HR professionals learn more about.
The advanced are for when you have the capacity to track more (i.e. you have hired a Talent/people operations specialist in your talent acquisition team).
While all of the metrics are important, it’s rare that you’ll have the capacity to actively keep track of everything.
So, rather than getting decision paralysis, start with the key metrics and work your way towards the advanced ones.
What Are Recruiting Metrics?
Recruiting metrics are used to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization's hiring process. They tell a different story than recruiting KPIs in that they are not always tied directly to business goals the way KPIs are.
These metrics help organizations evaluate the performance of their recruitment activities, optimize procedures, and make data-driven decisions to improve hiring outcomes.
Why Are Recruiting Metrics Important?
Recruiting metrics are crucial for helping you improve the efficiency of your hiring process, create a great candidate experience, and ultimately recruit talent that will help the organization achieve its goals.
Amongst other things, I use metrics in conjunction with other data sources to lower costs, optimize candidate sourcing, and guide the training and development of my team members.
10 Key Recruiting metrics
Let’s dive into the key recruiting metrics you’ll be tracking while building your metrics-tracking capabilities.
1. Time to Fill & Time to Hire
Time to Fill (TTF) and Time to Hire (TTH) are often used interchangeably, but there’s a difference.
Technically speaking, Time to Fill is the period between you opening a position and hiring someone.
Time to Hire is the time it took for the specific candidate you hired to move from application to hire.
Usually, both are measured in the number of days.
Initially, Time to Fill is a more important metric because it shows you on a higher level how long it takes for your company to hire anyone in a given position.
Benchmarks
As a benchmark, I’ve never been able to push the average down below 30 days and I wouldn’t recommend it either because you may be rushing your decisions.
However, if your hiring time is consistently above 90 days, you may want to investigate why. Is it the salary you’re offering? Too small a candidate pool? It’s not the end of the world, but something to investigate further.
Different organizations also have definitions of “hired”. Some consider a person “hired” when they sign their contract/offer letter. Others consider a candidate “hired” when they actually start.
If you’re hiring internationally, I’d use the time when they signed their contract rather than the start date.
This is because the start date can differ wildly from the contract date, due to notice periods in different jurisdictions.
For example, In the U.S. there can be almost no difference, but in a country like Germany it can be 3-6 months. This means that using the start date will not yield any comparable results as Germany will look slower to hire.
Most modern applicant tracking systems (ATS) make it easy to modify your starting points for each role, so you won’t need to manually track this.
2. Number of hires (vs. number of open positions)
You always want to be aware of how many hires you have per month/quarter/year and how that stacks up vs your headcount plan.
The two go hand in hand because you could have an ostensibly low number of hires e.g. 15 for the year, but if that is all the open headcount there was for the year then you have achieved 100% fill!
A “good” average per month depends on the market, your roles, your employer brand, and the team you have.
For example, if you’re a startup with almost no employer brand recognition, expect a lower number of placements unless you invest more money into either a larger team or external recruiters.
Benchmarks
Depending on the roles, sometimes as low as 2-3 placements per recruiter can be a great achievement!
On the other hand, larger companies with more candidate attraction should expect to average around 4-5 a month, once again depending on the role.
If it’s all customer experience, that would be more. If it’s all Principal Software Engineers—4 would be amazing a month!
3. Source of hire
There’s an ever-expanding number of ways to source candidates nowadays and it’s important to select those that are a good fit for your area, industry, and location. The main categories of sources are job hires, social media, direct sourcing, and referrals.
Take tech hiring as an example. Off the top of my head, I can think of so many platforms—Hired, Cord, Talent.io, Remoteok, Haystack, Honeypot.io.
You may be on some of those, or all of them, but keeping an eye on which ones yield good hires will avoid spending creep.
Who knows, maybe your best source is actually social media/community outreach (which most of the time is free anyway)!
It’s worth noting that most modern ATSs have a way for you to keep track of each candidate’s source, either by generating links for each job board or social media that tags it accordingly or integrating with them to show you directly.
Benchmarks
It can be a bit difficult to set a specific benchmark, but if you go two quarters without placements from a source that is costing you a lot of money—especially if it’s a specialised resource—it's time to review.
4. Number of applicants
This is quite a straightforward metric. On its own it may not say much, but it’s important to keep track of how many people you have to choose from.
For entry-level roles, you should expect more candidates as the requirements are lower and there should be a bigger pool.
If that’s not the case (e.g. a customer service role only receives two 2 candidates in a week) you may want to take a look at why that is. Are links working properly? Have you described the role appropriately?
On the other hand, if you’re consistently getting over 200 candidates a day, you may want to implement a closing deadline for posting so you or your team are not overwhelmed with applications.
You could also set up some automatic rejections in the ATS if candidates don’t meet specific requirements like location or visa status.
Benchmark
This really depends on the role and the strength of your employer brand. In this instance, I usually set the benchmark at the start and try to improve upon it vs looking at specific industry benchmarks.
5. Conversion ratio
The conversion ratio is how many candidates are passing through each stage vs how many candidates progressed to the stage.
This is probably my favorite metric because it tells you so much depending on where you are looking in the pipeline.
For example, if you are a recruiter who has screened 10 candidates, and submitted 8 to the hiring manager, then the conversion rate from screen to the introduction is 80%.
Then let’s say the hiring manager interviews all of them, but only passes one person to the next stage, the conversion ratio from the introduction to 2nd stage interview is only 12.5%. This is significantly lower!
Here is where looking a bit deeper into the story comes in. There are a few reasons I have seen why a scenario like the one above might happen:
- The recruiter is passing too many people off to the hiring manager and has not screened the candidates properly.
- The recruiter and the hiring manager aren’t on the same page regarding the requirements of the job.
- There is an unexpected requirement that has come up over the course of the interviewing that was not reflected in this pool of candidates (e.g. the hiring manager decides skill X moves from “nice to have” to “essential” so none of the candidates pass).
- The interview process isn’t fit for purpose so no candidate is ever going to pass.
There are more, but the point here is to study any discrepancies in conversion ratios across the recruitment process.
I use this metric to assess team performance and advise hiring managers e.g. if no one gets through the test stage then it’s worth examining the test.
Benchmark
One thing to note is that a good conversion ratio is no replacement for keeping up the volume of outreach.
A 100% conversion rate may sound great, but if you have only introduced, screened, and interviewed one candidate, that is not a proper search in the market for qualified candidates.
6. Recruitment funnel speed
Speed is crucial in hiring, so it’s essential to keep an eye on how long your hiring process takes and one way to do that is to see how long candidates spend in each stage of the funnel.
There is no need to rush through a process, but it’s great to review what is happening in each stage and check if something needs nudging or changing.
For example, if people are spending too long in the “testing" stage, why is that? Are candidates not willing to go through the test task you have for them? Are they going through the test but waiting too long for feedback on your company’s end?
I have had occasions where the test was not a fit or the link was broken and nobody flagged until I asked them about it.
Benchmark
This depends on the stage with the general heuristic bring the earlier the stage the quicker they should move through it.
Ideally, application to screen stage should be less than a week. Stages where there are interviews to be scheduled—especially in-person ones—can take a week to two weeks.
Ultimately you are looking to spot any patterns in your recruitment process where things are getting gummed up.
Remember, it all adds up to your overall time to hire and a faster, more efficient process will result in a better candidate experience and increase the likelihood of you hiring the talent you want.
7. Offer acceptance rate
This is a very simple ratio of how many offers are made vs. how many offers are accepted. In my previous article on how to make a job offer, I share my tricks to help ensure that candidates are more likely to accept an offer, but there is always a risk.
That’s why I never make it my aim to have a 100% offer acceptance rate. That is simply impossible in the long run, and you are setting yourself up for failure.
For example, if you have that as a target you may concede some unreasonable demands and make a hire that you will regret
I’ve had it happen where I, as the Talent Leader, advocated against hiring someone whose working demands we couldn't meet.
The hiring manager was insistent on keeping their own “track record” of never having an offer rejected. 2 months later the person was out as it just didn’t work.
Benchmark
A good acceptance rate depends on the market, role, employment conditions (salary, benefits), and the volume of hires.
If you have a few hires and are considered a good employer, you should be aiming for 90%+. If any of the other conditions are less than ideal then you should adjust this accordingly.
I’ve never dropped my expectations for my teams below 75%, regardless of role.
8. Candidate Net Promoter Score (CNPS)
Candidate Net Promoter Score (CNPS) is similar to the net promoter scores in customer experience management.
It’s a numerical score—usually out of 10 and anyone scoring less than 7 is considered a “Detractor”—i.e. their experience is not positive with your company.
The easiest way to manage the CNPS is to let the ATS do the heavy lifting for you. Some ATSs allow you to send candidates surveys about their experience at any stage of the hiring process using preset templates or customized questions.
That way you can have a mix of numerical (quantitative) and qualitative answers so people can score your hiring process and elaborate on any issues.
It’s a great way to gather feedback on the candidate experience—what works well and what you can improve on if you need to.
Personally, I prefer to send a candidate survey upon exit from the recruitment process. This could be at any stage post-first screen/first interview. I generally don’t ask for feedback via surveys during the process as I think that can be a bit spammy.
If candidates are rejected at the application stage, they may not have sufficient information about your hiring process beyond the application page to help.
Recently, I have seen some ATSs providing you the ability to create a feedback form at the end of an application especially aimed at assessing accessibility.
Benchmark
7 at a minimum but ideally higher!
9. Diversity of pipeline
While I do not advocate box-ticking, or having a minimum number of candidates from the X category, it’s important to keep track of the number of candidates from diverse backgrounds for your industry or area applying.
If you don’t have any in the pipeline, how can you encourage wider representation of your community? If you do have an accurate representation, what did you do to encourage this so you can keep it up and develop it further?
In some jurisdictions, it can be an issue keeping data on things like ethnic background, gender, etc. so please familiarise yourself with your jurisdiction’s rules and ensure you meet your recruiting compliance obligations.
Additionally, you can make the diversity-style questionnaire part of every application, but please be aware that some are incredibly long and will lengthen your application process and potentially cause people to drop out.
Benchmark
Diversity of candidates that is representative of your community.
10. Recruiter effectiveness metrics: Screens and outreach
These metrics are important to keep track of if you lead a team of recruiters and want to better understand the performance of each recruiter to aid in their development.
For example, you can see if you need to pull or push the outreach levers, optimize messaging, work on the screening call, or the volume of calls.
Benchmarks
It’s difficult to say how many recruiter calls or outreach messages are appropriate as every situation is different, but it’s good to set some expectations.
For example, for volume hiring, I’d expect them to have around 4-5 calls a day with candidates at minimum. If it’s a leadership hire, the expectation can be around 2-3 as they will need to spend more time researching and reaching out to candidates individually.
Additionally, you need to keep in mind how many roles a recruiter has. If they have 2 roles, they can’t reach the 4-5 calls a day for an entire month. If they are fully loaded (e.g. around 15-20 roles) then it’s reasonable they should be able to reach their targets for outreach or screens.
12 Advanced Recruiting metrics
These advanced metrics are for when you’ve built up your capabilities and feel ready to keep track of more metrics.
They are still important and helpful, but you may become overwhelmed by trying to track them all at once.
1. Probation passing
This covers working with hiring managers to understand whether new hires were ultimately a good fit and passed probation.
It’s not a completely foolproof metric to guarantee the quality of hire as there may be one-off situations that are not representative of candidate quality.
It does, however, help you build an overall picture of your company’s hiring practices. If a lot of employees are not passing probation, either in a specific team or overall, this could be symptomatic of many things including:
- Unrepresentative job descriptions
- A bad interview process
- A poor onboarding process
- Bad management.
Benchmark
This depends on the volume of hiring, but if you are getting >30% of lower volume hires, or >20% for higher volume, failing probation you need to investigate immediately.
2. Employee experience score at the start and after passing probation
(or 3-6 months if no probation).
This is a less talked about metric but something I have noticed can be quite indicative. Often, due to the excitement of a new job, the engagement scores of new employees can be slightly elevated.
I had a situation previously where there was a significant drop in employee engagement at the 3-month mark.
This is something I investigated by holding stay interviews with new starters and people 3 months into their jobs. Through that process, I realized that there was a misalignment in the way recruitment was talking about the company vs. the reality.
This prompted us to both retrain recruitment and launch an employer value proposition re-evaluation exercise with leadership.
It’s important to keep track of any difference as the first few months are crucial in how engaged or disappointed someone will be in their employment.
Many employee engagement tools (Peakon, Hibob, and CultureAmp) allow you to filter the results by tenure to check for any dips.
3. First year attrition
How many of your hires stay beyond a year is a potential indicator of the quality of the hire. You may also see it called retention rate, but I prefer to focus on the first year as a more appropriate timeframe for recruitment.
It’s quite a standard metric for companies to keep track of as an indicator of both hire quality and engagement.
In my opinion, it’s something that you have to keep waiting to see or to action anything against, so, for smaller companies at least, I prefer the above two as it lets them be more agile and responsive.
4. Average cost per hire
The cost per hire is all the expenditure around recruitment combined divided by the number of hires. Expenditure includes things like:
| Internal costs | External costs |
| Salaries of recruitment team + taxes | Agency fees |
| Benefits and other costs (IT or software) | Advertising costs/sourcing channel costs |
| Talent sourcing software | |
| Testing platform/services | |
| Events | |
| Background check services |
This is easier to calculate if you have a recruitment team budget tracker, so start with that first.
5. Sourcing channel ROI
As alluded to earlier, these can really creep up. I once encountered a situation where the previous leader had spent £80,000 in advertising and platform costs for just 8 hires!
For a deeper look into one of the costs listed above, I divide all the platforms my team uses and keep track of the cost per month/year vs how many hires they have generated.
For example, if a platform is fairly expensive, but hasn’t yielded a candidate that’s made it to the interview stage in a month or more, it’s likely time to review why that is.
The first step is to speak to your account manager at the platform (if there is one) and see if they can help. Otherwise, it may be time to look at alternatives as it is not yielding a return on investment.
With so many sourcing platforms out there, it’s easy for the costs to creep up.
6. Sourcing channel effectiveness
This is a more in-depth look at sourcing channels. If they’re not producing hires, maybe look at where candidates are dropping out of the recruitment funnel.
This may be a bit tougher to measure, but once again the modern ATS should be able to report on how many people go through the process at different stages from each channel—including the ones who don’t apply.
This is important, because it may help you identify which sourcing channels are most effective so you can double down your efforts there.
| Sourcing Channel | CV Screen | Recruiter Screen | 1st Interview | Test | Final Interview | Offer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn outreach | 80% | 75% | 60% | 40% | 25% | 10% |
| Platform 1 | 20% | 10% | 5% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Social Media | 40% | 10% | 8% | 2% | 0% | 0% |
| Platform 2 | 20% | 15% | 12% | 5% | 0% | 0% |
| Referrals | 60% | 50% | 50% | 40% | 25% | 25% |
| Job site applicants | 8% | 5% | 5% | 4% | 3% | 1% |
The above example shows that LinkedIn outreach and Referrals seem to be the most effective sources.
7. Hiring manager feedback
Many of the metrics I’ve covered have been quantitative, but it’s important to engage with hiring managers qualitatively as well. We’re in a people profession after all!
I like running regular retrospectives with hiring managers e.g. after we’ve done a massive push for hiring with a specific team, or after 6 months of regular hiring activities.
This is a great space for both parties to say what worked well and what didn’t. Below is a simple retro template I use:
| Mad | Sad | Glad | |
| Hiring Team | |||
| Talent Team |
8. Application completion rate
Modern recruiting software can give you the data on how many people clicked through to the job and how many completed their applications.
A high drop-off rate could indicate low engagement with your brand, the need for improvement in your job description, or an overly complex application process.
Benchmark
If more than 40% of candidates drop out of your application process, it’s definitely time to change something (note: this isn't people who clicked on your role, it’s people who have started and subsequently abandoned an application).
Ideally, this should be coupled with the Candidate NPS above.
9. Test completion rate
Similar to the application rate above, the test completion rate may tell you if the test is irrelevant or too onerous for candidates.
In tech circles, testing has been getting a bad rap recently because sometimes they’re seen as too artificial or irrelevant to the role.
If your test completion rate is low, assess the content of the test you are sending out as top talent will recognize irrelevant tests immediately.
Benchmark
If more than 40% of candidates are not completing the test, that is a cause for investigation. Any higher and is a cause for concern.
10. Employee referrals
Getting a good number of quality referrals is a great indicator that employees are engaged and want great people to come in and work alongside them.
However, either too low or too high a number of referrals can indicate issues.
Benchmark
Getting no referrals is a cause for concern; why are current employees not excited about having people they know join?
However, getting more than 75% (roughly) or more of your hires through referrals can lean into nepotism, groupthink hiring, and a very homogenous organization.
Too low may be something to investigate with teams. For example, if current engineers are not referring anyone to come and work with them, why is that?
If there are too many referrals but the majority aren’t right, are your referral incentives too high?
One thing I like to do with referrals is to ask “Who’s voice are we not hearing from in your team and how can you help us with that?”.
This encourages people to think about getting a diverse pool of referrals so that their team can be better rounded.
11. Days to a job offer
Again, this is a metric that can help you land candidates quicker and identify any snags in your recruitment process.
Days to a job offer = how long it takes you to make the offer to the candidate from the point you’ve decided you’d like to hire them.
Benchmark
Ideally, this time should be less than 72 hours in today’s market. If it’s often longer, it may be time to look at what is holding things up—is it the approval process, the admin, or something else?
12. Candidate withdrawal/rejection reasons
It’s important to see if there are patterns emerging in situations where candidates have withdrawn from your process or rejected your role or offer.
I’ve discovered issues such as uncompetitive salaries or hiring managers undermining the hiring process in some way.
Whenever you reject a candidate or remove them from the candidate pool, make sure to add the reason why in your ATS or similar. When you have enough data, you can then filter to generate reports.
In my current company, we “lost” candidates in the first half of this year for around 8 different reasons (took another role, role not a fit, salary not a fit, etc).
However, the recruitment dashboard showed we lost 55% of candidates due to our in-office policy.
I reported back to the leadership team to ask if we are going change it or continue trying to find candidates who are OK with coming to the office.
Metrics Tell You A Story
Modern recruiting software can help you gather data and present it in customizable dashboards.
However, the important thing is being able to identify the story the data is telling and how to adjust your recruitment strategy accordingly.
To give you an idea, I once had a situation where I was helping the Head of Sourcing at Twitch assess her team’s performance, which was showing only 80% attainment of the recruiter screen KPI.
However, when we looked deeper, we realized that the hiring ratio had actually increased slightly and we were on track for placements.
This means we were still producing the right candidates with fewer calls and therefore were a more efficient team.
By looking at the wider data, we could see the bigger picture rather than drive the team harder to reach an arbitrary number.
Choosing the right metrics will allow you to make data-driven recruitment decisions that are right for your organization. Not all of them will be relevant for all companies all the time, and you don’t want to end up in data paralysis!
Most importantly, once you choose what is right for you, look at a few of them to draw the right picture so you are not constantly chasing outliers. Once you've chosen your metrics to focus on, lean on your hiring analytics software to track it on your behalf while you focus on finding the right people for each role.
