Attract
This pertains to all metrics relating to sourcing, brand-awareness, the candidate pipeline, optimizing candidate attraction budgets, and sources.
Managing Up. Executives most want to understand the relative costs of attracting talent to the organization using statistics. Examples include the recruiting cost ratio and the overall staffing situation as it stands right now using vacancy rate data, since there is a direct link between vacancy rate and revenue in many organizations.
Managing Out. Using metrics to manage hiring manager behavior in the “attract” stage of talent development to focus in on metrics helps assess the interest level in hiring managers to attract high quality talent. The end result of this can include frequency of referring candidates for positions, feedback on sourcing strategies, and even participation in hiring events at colleges and so on. Used in this way, metrics can illustrate top management performers in acquiring new talent.
Managing Down. Managing the recruiting function in attracting candidates may range from the simple (total number of applicants/month, basic source per hire, percentage sourced from agencies) to the complex (detailed source effectiveness, employment brand awareness surveys, and qualified candidates per requisition, and the recruiter cost ratio). In managing down, using outside comparative data from SHRM, Staffing.org, HRMetrics.org, or even against your own benchmarks will help the internal organization. Keep in mind that these metrics are really only interesting to the HR team! An example of benchmark data on sources per hire is a Media Tracker report that uses standard advertising metrics applied to talent. Developed by the author, this metric shows benchmark data of job posting performance on several job boards against industry data. See Figure 6.1.
Two other areas of measurement for the recruiting team to consider are specific measures for employee referral programs (time to contact, top referrers) and diversity recruiting measures.