Effective Recruiting: What Do We Want?
What makes an effective talent acquisition strategy?
Hiring can be such an overwhelming and tedious task, especially for small businesses. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that THERE IS HOPE. There are tools out there to help your organization hire and retain top talent despite the internal and external barriers to recruiting that you may be facing.
When overcoming barriers in talent acquisition, it is important to evaluate how your strategies are projected to make a difference and if the business is seeing the advantages of implementation. One can track the effectiveness of talent acquisition and its impact on business results through relevant metrics. Having clarifying data of both a quantitative and qualitative nature can be a point to turn to for answers and direction.
The easiest way to accomplish this is through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for recruitment. Important metrics to utilize from an ATS could include…
Time to Hire: This can help when looking at different roles and the time ranges needed to keep the business running efficiently. Knowing how long a role can go empty before being filled without a large negative impact on business operation is critical to keeping your business running smoothly. If you know how long it takes to fill a position, you know how soon you need to start searching to fill roles.
Source to Hire: Tracking sources of recruiting can help you know which sources to harp on for human capital and which ones prove less effective/not worth the cost. This could include high schools/universities, specific online job boards, in-store applications, etc.
Section Statistics: One important way to use this is by looking at unfinished applications and asking the questions, ‘Where did they stop? Why would they stop there? Is that barrier for the candidate helping or hurting the business?’
Number of Candidates: Looking at the number of candidates across different roles can be useful (e.g., seeing how many people are applying to internal management positions could be a sign if learning and development initiatives are working well so top talent can be selected and developed for the best business results.)
Quality of Hire: This is one that needs to be tracked and recorded over a long period of time. We can look at employees with high success ratings and performance reviews. Then we can ask, ‘Where did the employee come from?’ and ‘Which recruiter/employee brought them in?’ These cross comparison uses of ‘Quality of Hire’ is critical to the success of the business strategy.
Cost Per Hire: This metric is fundamental to comparing recruitment efforts to cost-savings benefits for an organization. Perhaps if the turnover is high for a certain position, like the front of house cashier, then the cost per hire for said position might even be more in dollars than the employee brings in for the business in their short time working there.