When will we have more robust talent acquisition metrics which give a more end-to-end view of talent acquisition and all of the stakeholders? Today, we just have a quality-of-candidate set of metrics. What if we have a suite of quality metrics which spanned the process and all of the key stakeholders? The metrics could include the quality of: candidate, hire, hiring manager, recruiter, and process.
You see, quality metrics (something I’m talking about in Atlanta in October) in talent acquisition are still in their infancy. For the most part, companies measure quality of hire by 60 or 90 terminations, candidate slate metrics, or surveys. What if we turned these metrics on their head, and measured quality throughout the process? Rather than focusing on quality of hire, we could focus on quality of the hiring process. This would render quality of hire one of the output metrics, as opposed to an input metric.
Talent acquisition teams tend to focus on only the outputs. The quality of hire, in this case, is an output metric. It’s the thing that a system, which is the culmination of people, process, and technology, ultimately produces. The reality is that you really do not control the quality of hire. The process and all of the participants control the quality of hires the system produces. If you want to attract, select, and hire better quality candidates, then work on the process of attracting, selecting, and hiring better candidates. This will force you and everyone involved to have a greater stake in producing quality hires.
One of the most critical aspects to producing quality hires is …drum roll … the hiring manager. And we rarely, if ever, measure anything that the hiring manager does. All of the organizational focus is on what the recruiter is doing. We measure things like time to fill and hiring manager satisfaction. While these measures are very important, they do not tell the whole story.
I propose we start measuring items such as:
- Quality of interview — this would be a candidate survey measuring the quality of the interview itself.
- Time to requisition approved by hiring manager
- Time to schedule and complete interviews
- Turnover by hiring manager
- Cost to hire by hiring manager
When we start to add these critical measurements to the process, it will give us a much better idea of what is really going on to the hiring process. And this will give us much better control to improve the quality of hire.