What Are Recruitment Metrics?

After you’ve found an agency to outsource marketing operations, you’ll want to establish your baseline performance metrics. This is one of the most important aspects you should be discussing in your weekly management meetings. Move with efficiency, sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and work with the marketing agency that will inform your decision-making to establish your benchmark metrics.

The minimum amount of information required is below. You’ll want to review monthly performance to set a modest yet sturdy plan to create an evolved marketing strategy. It’s best if you have multiple years of data, and your historical performance will be limited to channels that you have invested time and budget into. It’s best if the metrics have been either reviewed or compiled and audited by a third party.

1. Application Completion Rates

Definition: This metric is for the top of the funnel. Somewhere in your management structure, someone is monitoring application completion rates. This ultimately compares how many applications were started vs. how many turned into completed applications.

Inverted: When you invert this funnel, you’ll see abandonment rates. Breaking down this metric will enable you to understand the opportunity for performance improvement. The best option is to try and understand where and why people are dropping off on certain devices, how many form fields are too many, and which job categories tend to have higher drop-off rates.

2. Sourcing and Channel Effectiveness

Definition: Today more than ever before, you’ll find staffing companies using an ever-increasing number of channels – job boards, referrals, career sites, social networks, and advertising. If someone submits an application and you haven’t tracked how they found you, you will lose track of how your budget is being spent and may increase your wasted spend – marketing dollars spent without identifiable return paths to revenue generation.

Inverted: At a glance, you may be able to compare which channels are performing far and above the rest. You’ll want to get more information including how many times your site/ad was shown an impression, how often it turned into a click, and the rate at which a click led to an application. Simply because you aren’t getting many clicks from a source like Wikipedia or GlassDoor doesn’t mean you should stop investing in that channel. On the contrary, you may find that millions of impressions and thousands of clicks on Indeed isn’t achieving the return you expected, or were counting on.

3. Cost Per Hire

Definition: To control cost per hire, you’ll need to make sure your website forms are properly synced with your applicant tracking system, and that fields are merged properly. Calculating a cost per hire is not inherently difficult, however, the pieces don’t always fit together, and monthly changes in your current staff and client base – no to mention the impact of your resource pool – can dramatically influence your perceived cost of hire.

Inverted: We’ve seen plenty of staffing startups that began their agencies without a website. It’s useful but not necessary. As a starting point, viewing your website as a digital recruiter to collect applications will give you a better sense of the impact of digital vs traditional outreach and data collection. Once you start attributing any placements or client requests from the website, then you’ve shifted to include the website as an asset instead of a liability, and you can look more deeply into the interactions that led to those events.

4. Time to Fill

Definition: From the moment there is a need for a new position through the process up until the completion of a contract, you need to know the exact time from when the application arrived in your inbox to the date that candidate is placed. This number has several variables tied to it for breakdown further, however, as a starting point, you’ll want to be able to identify the lead time to assess and predict future performance.

Inverted: An awareness of your time to fill gives you healthy indicators, and once you have these data points aggregated you’ll be able to paint a clearer picture for your firm and investors. Ideally, you’ll want to track the total time between when a hiring manager formally indicates the need. From there you may spend time looking for candidates in your existing database, and you may eventually proceed to spend time conducting lead generation efforts. The metric of time spent filling a position may seem too simple if you’re just starting out, and too complex after you have IT set up your dashboards. If you’re the business owner or the marketing manager, you know that your ability to sell and service contracts comes in part or solely from your ability to demonstrate that you can conduct business transactions at a faster rate than your competitors.

5. Retention Rates

Definition: Another major metric that you will want to be able to emphasize is the retention rates of placed candidates. Tracking and analyzing organizational performance for this metric will give you critical indicators of the ability to hire recruiters that can place qualified, no-headache candidates with long-term net gain for all parties involved.

Inverted: While this staffing metric may at first appear light-hearted, the diligence of your staff combined with the optimism and integrity of your candidates should continue to enhance your work, and retention rates should be a percentage you can open and freely discuss with prospects, potential candidates, and your internal team. When you have the right reporting set up, decision-making is done for you to confer with those parties to identify gaps for innovation and improvement.

6. Offer Acceptance Ratio

Definition: While this ratio may seem simple at first, staffing analysts may disagree. Once a client signs off on a contract, you now have to convert candidates into contributing temp or full-time employees. This process may take months or years, and this is but one variation of how to conceptualize your data points on offer acceptance. For example, your data analytics or dashboards may shed light into how long offers were outstanding prior to acceptance, and you may even take into account the difference between the amount of time it takes for acceptance and rejection.

Inverted: From a management standpoint, your database is the list you need to live and breathe. New clients with new job orders will put a light but bearing weight on your recruiting team, and new candidate applying for jobs you don’t have orders for – yet. Neither of these circumstances is entirely unbearable at a glance, however, the optimal customer journey in staffing revolves around just-in-time applications to fill new or recent job orders. Build out your total number of contracts by looking for companies that need the talent you already have in your pipeline. Build out your candidate list by filling for new or anticipatory job orders. The happy medium is to maintain high offer acceptance ratios that don’t overextend your staff, your clients, or your candidates.

The best place to find the answers to the questions we’ve presented will likely be in some spreadsheets or reports sent to you quarterly or weekly. Connect with a Staffing Nerd for consultative conversation or to request an analyst to join your next quarterly conference call.

Staffing companies considering a digital growth strategy must embrace the concept of outsourcing marketing operations to reduce complexity, overhead, and management. When done correctly, working with marketing agencies that focus on staffing will reduce considerable time, money, and other resources.

This blog post is the second in a series to help staffing business owners and marketing managers efficiently create a framework for tactical lead (client or candidate) acquisition. Learn how to avoid destructive efforts and implement sound best practices to make informed decisions through the process.

Using an agency for horizontal integration provides for marketing, creative, and development resources to help grow your team without the management or overhead.

Finding a company to outsource your marketing operations is perhaps the hardest part of the whole process. Start with your own professional network. After that, you may need to engage an industry insider to hear who has the best portfolio. Always keep in mind ‘why’ you’re pursuing an agency and share that perspective with your business partner or investment banker. Understanding your reasons and motivations will help him/her guide budget allocation and advise accordingly.

Beyond the day-to-day management of your marketing operations, finding a company that can conduct digital marketing initiatives on your behalf will greatly increase your internal attention to offsite, offline activities. There are three topics of consideration when approaching a firm or comparing a new one to existing resources.
 

Hand-Picked Network

The right agency will have personal relationships with every single individual in their expansive network. Look to them to jump-start your selection process by providing only pre-screened, well-qualified, ready-to-work candidates.
 

Industry Insiders

You need more than a staffing company. If you can, find have a full-service digital agency under the same roof, and use their own in-house digital strategists and marketing professionals to find and source talent for your needs.
 

Post-Placement Support

Placing a candidate is just the first step in a long journey. Look for an agency that is willing to stay connected to your candidate lifecycle and give you the tools you need to stay successful and productive over the long haul.
 

There is a multitude of ways that staffing marketing agencies can provide support to your company. If you’re a classic staffing firm, you may be focusing on developing social media plans and blog posts to keep your web visibility fresh in social feeds. Modern firms may require more technology-intense architects to fix complex issues or build custom software integrations with your technology partners.
 

Common agencies can find or fill the following roles, as they relate to building your web presence into an engine for producing client requests and candidate applications:

• SEO / SEM Professionals

• Copywriters

• Project Managers

• Front-End Developers

Staffing companies considering a digital growth strategy cannot go forward blindly with guesswork and speculation. That’s a recipe for disaster and will waste considerable time, money, and other resources. This blog post is the first in a series to help staffing business owners and marketing managers efficiently create a framework for tactical lead (client or candidate) acquisition. Learn how to avoid destructive efforts and implement sound best practices to make informed decisions through the process.

Why double down on candidate acquisition in the first place? Obviously, it’s to make your company stronger but define ‘why’ in clear specifics about your business.

Are you considering any M&A events?

Strategic allocation of investment capital towards creating or cementing an indefensible and categorically scalable approach to decreasing cost-per-placement is a conversation that should be held monthly, if not weekly.

If you are buyer-side, consider bringing in consulting groups to appropriately assess the key behavior of web visitors and understand the website’s capacity to consistently and adequately yield candidate and client contacts turned contracts. Without a third-party assessment to gain perspective on realistic projections and opportunities for improvement, you may rely on the first impressions of the web analytics and pay-per-click campaigns set up by other agencies.

If you are seller-side, don’t start anything and keep conversations closed until you have an aggressive yet understanding control over the cost of your return on advertising and marketing spend. This is especially true if you have only managed your marketing internally.
 

Are you considering adding new service offerings?

If you rely on your website for any degree of reasons to sustain the profitability of your business, you need to understand that it can take up to three months for updates to your website – new service pages, blog posts, or landing pages – to be indexed fully. Indexing is the second phase of the use of Googlebot. Googlebot is the processing engine that initially crawls, or copies, versions of every website on the internet. Since Google is processing more than five billion queries per day, Googlebot has less bandwidth and therefore can create a pause between when you publish a page and when Googlebot receives an updated copy to index. Indexing is the processing of using natural language processing to dissect words and phrase groups, create ontological parsing and linguistic analysis of the text segment. It boils down to a weighted probability of recency, frequency, and reach.

Recency – how new is the content on your website? If you’re new to the web, it will take you longer to create organic search rankings competitive to a firm that has historically performed well on existing keywords.

Frequency – how often are you adding (ontologically) relevant keywords in bulk formats to your site examples include blog posts and landing pages.

Reach – Once you understand the importance of recency and frequency, reach is most correctly considered to be a result of affirmative user behavior in historical visits to your website.

For example, you might be strong in per diem healthcare and want to expand into travel nursing. If you want clients and candidates to find you, it’s important to forget that getting and keeping rankings in Google is a full-time job.

Are you looking into geographic expansion?

Do you have a really strong footprint in your region and want to establish new offices?

Look for opportunity in other states or regions in close proximity. Through analyzing your business you may have discovered some client concentration issues. Capturing new candidates or clients may allow you to grow at a quicker pace in the market. In every case, you really want to hone in on reasons that are going to work for you and engage your team to encourage the process.

Have you seen similar companies to yours grow faster?

The green-eyed monsters rear their heads from time to time, and the competitive spirit is highly sought after in staffing firms with deep market knowledge. Small steps towards increasing your market share – whether by service, specialty, or locale – all add up. If you’re forward thinking in your approach to business development, you’ve already thought through the competitive advantages and disadvantages in place. Some staffing companies are client heavy and candidate weak. Regardless, our opinion remains firm: Leverage digital acquisition and hire the most talented recruiters and account managers you can find.

We discussed this in a conversation with Justin Allison from ERO Staffing. Justin embraces the opportunity digital marketing allows for, and gave us some insight into the best recruiter he’s ever worked with, and hired. Read below to catch a snippet from our conversation.

Justin Allison, Director of Locum Tenens Recruitment and Marketing
ERO Workforce Solutions

From a recruiter standpoint, and this is a recruiter that I hired and that’s not why I’m going to say, “She’s the best,” just because I hired her because frankly it had nothing to do with me, it’s all about her. This individual is absolutely exceptional. We knew it from the very moment she stepped in our office for an interview there was something special about this girl.

She comes from an extremely good family background of core values. Work ethic is insane. That’s so important, work ethic. She’s a former D1 college basketball player. I personally have hired a lot of former student athletes because there’s a lot of parallels in recruiting as in with athletics, team sports. It’s a good transition for new recruiters that have played sports throughout high school and or throughout college.

You could just tell from the get go, from the phone interview to then the in-person interview to the second one. And then what literally sealed it, to give you a little bit of insight on this individual and how she grew up and just her foundation of who she is, she’s from Iowa. In the summers, she would work in the corn fields husking up and down. One of her athletic directors told me this about how dedicated she was to her sport:

Her dad would take her to the golf course and he would tee off on the tee 300 yards and make her do these sprints over and over and over again.

I already knew she was going to kill it once she got trained. She was obviously very green and took time to train her, get her up to speed, but she’s unstoppable and she’s the best in my opinion. She is the number one recruiter in the game right now for healthcare staffing.

She’s currently in a director role. She actually took over my position after I left. She’s going to be a CEO one day if she wants to. She can do frankly whatever she wants, she’s unstoppable. Period.”