Acquire

This refers to all tasks relating to screening, assessing, interviewing, offering, and hiring candidates into open jobs.

Managing Up. Interestingly, two of the top five C-level metrics fall under this phase of the lifecycle: new hire quality and time-to-start. Careful readers have already noted that executives did not report the time-to-fill metric (almost always using the hire/offer accept date) as important. Executives want to see the time it takes for the candidate to start working at the company. The time-to-fill number is interesting to HR, but not to this audience.

That new hire quality rated as the top metric that executives care about is both exciting and problematic. It is exciting that executives feel the quality of employees has a direct link to the performance indicators that they are tasked to manage (financial performance, competitive advantage, market position, and so on). However, it is problematic when the priority is compared to the reality of the HR/recruiting budget. As a senior vice president of a Fortune 100 HR organization once noted, “Recruiting is just like Sales and Marketing, with a lousy budget to support it.” Certainly there is opportunity for HR management to use metrics to leverage the investment required to impact the quality of hire.

Managing Out. There is the opportunity to use metrics as the measuring stick for the service level agreement between HR and the Hiring Manager. In acquiring talent, the metric that was most consistently a sore point in between recruiting and their constituents is Contracted Time to Fill. Note that this is a contract for a service level of both parties, HR and Hiring Manager alike. There is little chance that a contracted time to fill can be improved without both parties creating the service level. At a recent HR Metrics conference, we found several HR analysts frustrated that while they’ve implemented the contracted time to fill metric, their number had not decreased at all in months. After drilling down further we found that the Hiring Manager was dictating the time to fill date, regardless of their recruiter’s feedback on the reality of recruiting that position, in that market, and/or at that salary level. Using contracted time to fill as a true partnership has a much higher likelihood of leveraging change than without it.

Another helpful weapon in managing hiring managers is the Hiring Manager Time-to-Respond metric, which has been used in many organizations to illustrate how quickly a hiring manager is able to get back to the recruiter with feedback on resumes supplied for their jobs. This can be a power motivator when the hiring manager can see the ranked order of their performance against their peers, knowing that their managers also see this data.

Managing Down. Managing the recruiting function in acquiring talent is probably the most clearly documented segment of recruiting metrics available, so we will not drill down deeply here. However, note that the Recruiting Efficiency Ratio is not just a powerful tool for executives, it is a tool for HR to understand how they perform against their peers in other organizations. Recruiters are remarkable people—and competitive too! Great recruiters want to beat out their competition for talent, and they want to do it faster and better. Comparative metrics (hires per recruiter, talent pipeline metrics, and so on) within the recruiting team are usually readily available from the company Applicant Tracking System (ATS) as well. Maximize the data that you have here.

Bad Data Starts with Bad Process. The top 20 or so talent management systems are far more advanced than the applicant tracking systems of years ago. It used to be a burden for recruiters to status candidates inside of their system—no recruiter wanted to do it. Not so with today’s systems. Recruiters benefit from using these systems in myriad ways from better search and resume data mining, to keeping talent pools of data and automated offer letters. The price for recruiters within your organization should be meticulous interview statusing. With newer systems, it takes seconds to status batches of candidates at a time. And it gives the HR analyst who is running metrics the data needed to create many of the reports that you need. If you have a good process and enforcement, good data will come naturally.