Key Metric Tracking – How It Helps Enhance Your Hiring Strategy

Organizations that use hiring metrics are better positioned to measure the effectiveness of their hiring strategy. By assessing the hiring pipeline with well-known Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can better evaluate the condition of your talent pool and find out where processes could be enhanced.

As with any system, a robust hiring pipeline of qualified candidates requires regular maintenance. KPI reports offer real, actionable data with which you can make smarter, informed decisions about hiring procedures.

The main goal of recruitment optimization is to place eligible candidates faster while simultaneously enhancing the candidate experience. HR teams that have an advanced analytics platform are more likely to make process improvements and reduce costs.

Tracking against milestones is crucial to the health of your hiring pipeline. It provides you with key insights to better understand the availability of talent, the position of your candidates within the process, and the impact your workflows have on resource management.

There are six milestones every HR team should be tracking:

Applied: An applicant responds to a job posting.

Shortlisted: A candidate advances from the new status in the hiring pipeline.

Interviewed: Your HR team completes an interview guide for a candidate, recording, and rating the candidate’s answers.

Job Offered: A qualified candidate receives an offer letter from you.

Hired: A candidate accepts the offer and moves to the hired status.

Rejected: Your HR team determines the candidate isn’t the right fit for the position and the candidate moves to the rejected status.

Every company has different recruiting needs and unique workflows. To optimize your hiring pipeline, it’s essential to invest in reporting tools specifically customized to your organization’s needs.

An advanced applicant tracking system gives you the ability to create custom reports and save them for further use. A detailed level of customization is ideal for HR leaders who want to introduce new insights into their hiring pipeline on a regular basis.

Businesses need to understand that a hiring pipeline is much more than a resume database. It acts as an expression of the relationships your company has formed with potential candidates. Though a resume database maintains documents, a pipeline tracks which applicants have contacted your organization, which candidates have passed assessments, and which individuals are ready to be interviewed. The hiring pipeline serves to speed up the hiring process while maintaining high-level attention to detail.

Tracking hiring milestones allows your HR team to measure the effectiveness of the hiring pipeline. Investing in an applicant tracking system that can quickly report on the hiring pipeline allows you to track the average time candidates spend in the process before a final hiring decision is made. In doing so, you can easily find hurdles, understand why candidates are getting stuck, and propose informed solutions to these challenges as they arise.

Significantly, milestones measure the number of candidates who become disengaged in the midst of the hiring pipeline. Losing competent candidates before they complete their journey presents a real business risk. Reports make it easier for you to find patterns of behavior and find out their root cause for later optimization.

Workflow KPIs are useful tools that help you discover how to improve internal workflows. By approaching process enhancements from a place of knowledge, stakeholders have many more opportunities for success.

Workflow optimization directly correlates to better resource management. Your team should have access to robust reporting options to know exactly where your money is spent, which channels are most effective, and how the workflows impact the candidate experience. With this data, you’ll be able to easily find out where future resources will make the most significant impact in a timely manner.

A strong candidate pipeline also develops a passive candidate pool where you can easily attract skilled candidates as new positions open up. Having this network in place reduces any strains on your resources and allows you to place qualified candidates faster, resulting in decreased time to hire.

Having quantifiable data on your processes gives you all of the insights you need to develop and maintain a best-in-class hiring strategy. By being able to show your ROI, your executive team will better understand the level of effort and resources needed to source quality talent.

Without a reporting structure in place, relevant candidates may get lost in your workflows, and processes may stagnate. To build your talent pool and control your costs at the same time, having concrete goals and tracking your methods is the foundation to success.

Efficient hiring should include milestone tracking, standard and custom reporting, a robust candidate database, workflow reporting, and internal resource KPIs. Data-powered recruiting is the key to your HR team’s success, allowing you to make better hiring decisions and continually enhance internal workflows.