Operational excellence comes from making hiring a first-class process that's focused on by leaders, is continually improved upon, and consists of measuring, auditing, and designing intentionally.

Symptoms of poor processes include the following:

• Systems and tools do not mesh when everyone does their own thing. Data is duplicated, it's hard to know which versions of documents are the latest, and reporting is a nightmare.
• People don't live in the central tools. This may be due to people having their favorite spreadsheets, or not having been trained on the central tools. Either way, it becomes a downward spiral until people commit to using one central set of tools.
• Too much red tape. Identify where hiring processes slow to a crawl, which is problematic for candidates and employees alike. Make it someone's job to get consensus and begin to streamline those processes.

Of the dozens of possible measures of hiring performance, here are some of the most useful ones: useful hiring measurements

• Qualified candidates per opening gives you an internal benchmark for how soon you're likely to fill a role. It's more useful if you don't have just an overall average, but instead calculate it separately by role.
• Candidate survey results are a critical measurement of your brand reputation. Be sure to measure continuously and by department, with departments rewarded or held responsible for results, as the case may be.
• Source to close tells you how quickly or slowly candidates move through your hiring process. Improving this number can pay dividends in a better candidate experience, and a more competitive hiring brand.
• Offer acceptance rate is one of the better measures of your hiring brand and candidate experience. It merits regular monitoring.
• Hires to goal gives you the big-picture outcome of your hiring efforts in a given period. As with other measures, it's best done not only in aggregate but also by department.
• Quality versus quantity by source allows your hiring dollars to go much farther, because you'll be able to make informed decisions about the sources that actually produce results for you.