Essential Recruitment KPIs to Track in 2024

You, like many recruiters, probably first got into this line of work because you love the conversations that come from meeting exceptional people. You enjoy extending offers and placing perfect matches into your organization’s open roles.

But, as you know, great conversations and relationships aren’t the only important thing in HR. Maintaining accurate data on your hiring and interviewing process is equally important.  It ensures your talent acquisition strategy is adapting effectively in an evolving industry.

As you formulate your approach to this year’s hiring, make sure you have these must-track recruitment KPIs captured in how you measure your team’s success.

Best Recruitment KPIs to Track

Tracking recruitment KPIs—that stands for key performance indicators—are going to help you document the success of your recruiting efforts. Each metric you track helps you decide what area needs improvement in your hiring process.

Hiring metrics to track should include:

• Time to Fill. Time to fill is a job-based metric that covers the time it takes to fill an open position. It is measured in days since you post the original job post on a job board or otherwise open the position for applications. Reducing time to fill is a common goal of many hiring teams.
• Time to Hire. Similar to time to fill, time to hire is a candidate-based metric that documents the time it takes a candidate from submitting their job application in your database to accepting an offer for a job.
• Cost per Hire. Cost per Hire is the total cost incurred to recruit your final candidate for an open role. Check out this blog for information on how interviewing tools decrease cost per hire.
• Quality of Hire. This metric measures, as objectively as possible, how effective a new hire is in the role they were recruited for. It is one of the hardest metrics to track, but also one of the recruitment KPIs rated most important by HR professionals.
• Turnover Rate. Your turnover rate reflects the rate at which employees leave your organization, either on a voluntary or involuntary basis.
• Offer Acceptance Rate. This is the frequency at which your candidates accept the jobs you offer them.
• Candidate Dropoff Rate. This is the rate at which candidates drop out of your application process. It’s important to track to see where candidates are dropping off so you can improve that area of your recruitment process.

Why Measure Hiring Data?

Tracking your hiring data and measuring it against recruitment KPIs helps you to improve your hiring process and recruit the best candidates for your company. It allows you to see which candidates have a great quality of hire and to hone in on the hard and soft skills of your top workers. And, measuring your recruitment KPIs allows you to see where in your process you can cut costs.

How to Track Recruitment KPIs

Some hiring metrics, like time to fill and time to hire, are pretty straightforward. You have a starting event: when a job was posted, or a candidate submitted an application. You have an ending event: when the job was filled, or the candidate accepted your offer. And then you simply calculate the time that passed in between them, and measure up how your numbers compare to industry averages.

Other KPIs, like quality of hire and cost per hire, can be a little more complicated.

For example, in cost per hire, you need to decide how you’ll break down overall technology costs across multiple roles. Whether and how to calculate any business losses you can attribute to having a role open or having key people investing time in the interview process rather than on their actual work, and related questions. See this blog for formulas on how to track each hiring metric.

Fortunately, modern recruiting and interviewing software is purpose-built to help you track hiring data so you can make these calculations. By using a single platform to track candidates from application start to start date, you’ll have an automated way to track and calculate these metrics and measure your operational excellence.

Using technology to support this process is especially essential if you’re filling more than a few roles over the course of a year. Even the simple metrics become difficult to track and calculate by hand if you’re talking about dozens of openings, and leaving room for human error isn’t going to help you advocate for your team when it comes to resource allocation or other big conversations.

Assessing the ROI from Recruiting Efforts in Your Talent Acquisition Budget

With the help of the right technology, accurately and thoughtfully measuring your recruiting KPIs can help you make important decisions and improvements to your talent acquisition program.

Tools like interviewstream’s interview insights are here to help you get your feet underneath you and make this year your year of operational excellence. We’re here to help you recruit the best candidates for your company. Click here to schedule a time to chat about how we’ve helped over 900 organizations recruit their top candidates while tracking their hiring data.

About The Author

Caroline Chessia is the Marketing Operations Specialist at interviewstream. She loves color-coordinated graphs, hiking in the mountains, and every dog she meets—especially the Golden Retrievers.