5 Talent Acquisition KPIs You Might Be Ignoring Today

If you’re an HR professional, then you probably know all the talent acquisition KPIs by heart. Reciting them is even easier. You’ve got time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, time-to-fill…

But for those of you that aren’t exactly sure what these KPIs are, let’s go over the basics together.

Talent acquisition KPIs are specific metrics that are an essential part of data-driven recruitment or hiring. They also allow recruiting teams to measure the overall efficiency of their function. So essentially, KPIs allow managers to assess their team’s strengths, as well as the recruitment efficiency of individual recruiters.

So, without further ado, here are 5 critical talent acquisition KPI examples that will help you boost your talent acquisition process in 2023!

What are the top talent acquisition KPIs that positively influence and improve your strategy?

What a great question! KPIs for talent acquisition are not passing HR trends. They are crucial for your talent acquisition strategy and, most importantly, your company’s success. Selecting the right talent acquisition KPIs for your organization, monitoring them, and making adjustments accordingly are vital steps to ensuring you constantly assess and improve your talent acquisition strategy.

Let’s slice that pie into smaller bits and dig deep into the good stuff!

Cost per quality applicant

If money wasn’t an issue in an alternate universe, companies would be able to hire the best talent without spending a dime. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in the real world.

Today, companies from all across the world have real budgets and a heavy concern regarding their talent acquisition costs. From the soaring expenses of agency fees, sourcing costs, travel costs, recruiter compensation, and hiring platform costs – just to name a few.

But the truth of the matter is the cost per quality applicant (CPQA) is a crucial KPI for talent acquisition. It can monumentally influence your talent acquisition strategy. So what makes this metric so important? 

• CPQA allows you to understand how much you’ve spent on a job (or campaign) to yield an applicant that you believe is “qualified” for the role.
• Make an estimation of the cost involved in adding a new role to a department, which would aid in determining the appropriate approach for acquiring this talent for the team.
• Gain insight into areas where recruitment expenditure is potentially being squandered by analyzing actual costs that exceed initial estimates.
• Identify the media platforms and vendors that generate top-notch candidates for specific job positions or skill requirements.

Now, only you can measure what makes the candidate “qualified”. Maybe it’s those candidates that nail the phone screen, have a certain amount of experience, or that score high in a certain assessment. Once you pin down what makes a certain candidate qualified, it’s then time to crunch in the math.

Assume that you spent $900 on LinkedIn to promote a Sales Manager position. Let’s also say that you got 100 candidates, of which only 10 are qualified. If that’s the case, you’ll need to divide $900 by 10 to get the cost per quality candidate, which is $90.

To put it into perspective, always try to determine the average CPQA for some roles. For instance, if the average CPQA for a Sales Manager is $90 and last quarter, the average was around $150. You can take that as an indicator that the way you’re portraying your message is not exactly luring in the best candidates for that role.

Bear in mind that the cost per quality applicant tends to vary based on the channel. So while your favorite job boards might pour in the largest number of candidates, they might also yield the most expensive CPQA! All in all, this metric can help you get a birds-eye view of your talent acquisition. Plus, it helps you see at a glance which channels are working best for you and which ones are not. After all, the goal of this KPI is to tell you whether your in-house HR department is doing well or not.

Sourcing channel efficiency

Cost per quality applicant is only one piece of the pie. Now it’s time to slice into the other piece; sourcing channel efficiency. So you got some awesome candidates dripping into your pipeline, do you ever wonder where they’re coming from?

The sourcing channel efficiency KPI is a metric that tells you that information. So, for example, you can easily determine if a candidate came from an online job board, social media platform, career page, or other sources.

If you’re looking to enhance your talent acquisition strategy, start by optimizing your sourcing channels. On the bright side, an award-winning hiring platform like EVA-REC can help you post jobs on 2,000+ job boards. Also, you can track where your candidates are coming from at any time.

For example, EVA-REC offers advanced analytics that shows you at a glance which sourcing channels are most effective and drives the most conversions. This way, it will be easier to prioritize the most relevant candidate sources, optimize your recruitment budget, and post jobs on the right channels every time. In short, you can invest more in the channels that bring you more talented candidates!

With such advanced analytics, you can visualize your most fruitful candidate sources. It could be in visually appealing charts or graphs that give you a quick breakdown of the information you need.

So why is this KPI talent acquisition important for your talent acquisition strategy?

Think about it this way, if one of your talent acquisition KPIs is to reduce turnover. It is really useful to know where your top-notch candidates are coming from and what kind of postings pique their interest. Will it be videos that showcase the company’s culture? Or the blog posts related to the company? Whichever the case, track why some sources aren’t triggering enough conversions. Through this KPI, you will be to track these sources and improve their efficiency.

Quality of Hire

While all talent acquisition metrics are important, many companies find that the quality of hire metric is the holy grail of all other metrics. Just like beauty, the quality of hire is in the eye of the beholder – it varies from organization to organization.

When hiring, you need to find the right candidate – not just any candidate who will take the job. Therefore, this metric can help you see how successful your company has been in hiring the right fit for the job.

Truth be told, this KPI can be a bit trickier to measure than the other ones. Simply because it’s specific to your company goals and what ‘’quality’’ means to you.

So, for example, it may involve calculating turnover rates, performance reviews, team fit, and employee retention. Simply put, the formula for calculating the quality of hire is (performance + productivity + retention) ÷ (N)

This means, recruiters need performance and retention data to accurately calculate this KPI. And remember, while crunching in the numbers can shed some great light, you shouldn’t forget about measuring how the candidates fit with the company’s culture. So if you keep on attracting awesome hires that only last a couple of months – it might be that you’re screening for the wrong traits. Herre are 6 qualities of hire indicators to consider:

• Employee engagement
•  Job performance
• Turnover rates
• Team feedback
• Client feedback
• Training time

Although it may be somewhat challenging to tell if the prospective candidates will be the right fit before you bring them on. You can easily pinpoint patterns between high-quality hires based on pre-defined criteria.

To improve your quality of hire, you can always opt to leverage video interviewing software like EVA-SSESS. One of the greatest benefits of using video interviewing software is that you have one centralized place to assess the candidates. Meaning video assessment interviews are stored on the cloud, and you can revisit them at any time you wish.

As we mentioned earlier, if you’ve got a model answer or specific keywords that you wish to hear from the candidates, our video interviewing software can instantly spot them for you. You can create a relevancy percentage for each answer. This means that you can compare the candidate’s answers to yours and quickly decide whether this candidate meets your company’s expectations or not. 

As a result, video interviewing software allows you to hire qualified candidates rather than spend more time contemplating their qualifications and eligibility. Allowing you to seamlessly improve and optimize your talent acquisition strategy.

Interviews per hiring decision

Various talent acquisition KPIs measure essential activities in the hiring stage. Whether it’s the cost per hire, time to fill, quality of hire – and much more. While these KPIs might revolve around the candidate, they still lack insight into the resources that are demanded from other important decision-makers or stakeholders.

Therefore, interviews per hiring decision is a very helpful metric. It enables recruiting teams to discover the average number of interviews that are needed in order for a hiring decision to be made. So, assume that you have a vacancy for a Marketing Specialist and you’ve got 5 quality candidates in your talent pool. Let’s say each one needs three interviews. This means you’ve got a total of 15 interviews to make – even though only one of them will make the final cut.

Still, that’s 15 interviews per hiring decision.

Now, remember, this benchmark will always vary based on the position that you’re hiring for. Because a highly specialized or senior role might require more interviews or assessments to be conducted. And if you’re looking to interview candidates fast and in less time – video assessment interviews will always come to the rescue. Simply because video assessment interviews enable you to effortlessly qualify candidates without the need to spend an exorbitant amount of time interviewing them face-to-face. Therefore saving more than 90% of your valuable time and money when interviewing candidates!

Candidate Experience (Net Promoter Score)

There is no standard or easy way of giving a candidate an experience that is existentially superb. You need to put in the effort to track the metrics that are necessary to prove that your methods and strategies are running efficiently.

Let us start by saying that the candidate experience extends throughout the entire hiring process. It doesn’t stop once a candidate gets an interview. It’s an ongoing process. The process starts from the moment a candidate discovers a position to the moment he or she receives an offer or rejection letter. 

All in all, this KPI can either hinder or enhance your talent acquisition strategy. So if your interview process is painstakingly slow, it can severely impact your employer brand. Or, if your recruiting team interacts with candidates in a very impersonal tone, it can also negatively impact the candidate experience. This is a big setback – because it’s important to get these talent acquisition metrics right. So the best way to start is by implementing a survey after each step in the hiring process.

The easiest way to calculate this metric is by the following: 

Why is this metric important? Because when taken lightly, it can go beyond simply losing top talent. According to SandOutCV, 50% of candidates who had a poor candidate experience with a company will no longer purchase their products or services. Therefore, it will be less likely to recommend the company to its network. 

So the net promoter score can help recruiters gauge how candidates feel about the overall hiring process. Not only will this help you assess each and every hiring step – but you’ll also be able to create a more holistic view of the candidate experience. Plus, you can pinpoint bottlenecks or gaps that you may have never known about before.

Keeping it short

We don’t track talent acquisition KPIs because everyone else is doing it – or because it’s good for our health. We do it to see what’s working and what’s not in talent acquisition! Only then will we be able to get the resources, tools, or technology we need to address these setbacks head-on?

Selecting and monitoring now the KPIs that will influence your talent acquisition strategy will be more efficient. You will make great strides in ensuring that you are always assessing and improving your talent acquisition efforts.

Author