Managing Through Metrics

Metrics have the ability to change the business processes of an entire company overnight. Companies that have embraced any quality program (Six Sigma, etc.) can attest to the power of a good metric. But what makes a quality metric powerful is that it’s directed towards a process. A Six Sigma is meaningless unless it is directed to measure something you suspect needs to be managed or changed. How many metrics have been created because the data is available and you need something for the big executive meeting that looks good on a pie chart?

Building metrics throughout the talent life cycle must have a management goal. It does not need to be an executive goal, but there must be an intended audience, a management or change goal, and a buy-in on that goal by all stakeholders.

An example of using a powerful metric the wrong way: At a recent conference on metrics, an HR manager complained that their hiring manager’s contracted time-to-fill metric, which is an agreed time-to-fill service level between recruiter and hiring manager, hadn’t impacted the time-to-fill of recruiting at all. Probing further we discovered that hiring managers set the date for time-to-fill without any HR agreement. Literally, in this contracted time-to-fill, one of the parties (HR) had no say in setting the measure! There is no possible way a change can occur if the teams working in the process can’t both agree to participate in change management.

When it comes to leveraging change using HR metrics, it may be helpful to categorize the metric according to the audience to confirm you are using the right metric for the right audience. A simple categorization of HR metrics according to audience is as follows:

Managing Up. Metrics that are meant to satisfy objectives that HR and executive teams have agreed will impact larger business objectives. If your metric is managing some priority up the management chain, it’s important that your team and the executive teams understand what you want to measure to.

Managing Out. Metrics can also leverage change within the constituents that you serve. HR can leverage change with hiring managers to reduce time-to-fill, to increase retention rates of “A” players, to improve the interviewing experience, and much more. These metrics support the improvement of talent metrics.

Managing Down. These metrics are likely the most frequently used within HR that optimize the performance of the HR and recruiting teams themselves. These metrics have interest to managers within HR and to those that are being measured, but have little interest outside of the HR organization.

Once you categorize the metric, it becomes clear what metrics you want to present to an audience and which ones you may not. How many times have executive eyes glazed over when reviewing a source of hire chart for the Q1 recruiting cycle?