Recruitment KPIs: The biggest mistake staffing businesses make
Tags: Kpi, Recruiting, Hiring, Staffing And Recruiting, Key Performance Indicator

Most staffing businesses track various key performance indicators (KPIs) including time to hire, offer to acceptance, quality of hire, cost per hire, candidate sourcing, and candidate pipeline, etc. to measure recruitment productivity, efficiency and business growth.

While there is no shortage of punditry on what KPIs businesses need to track and why, little attention is given to the most important aspect of tracking KPIs: sharing the information with relevant stakeholders inside and outside the organization.

Failing to effectively communicate the relevant KPIs and the insights derived from them with your sales team, customers, recruiters, HR managers, can negatively impact your business.

Businesses instead need to share the KPIs with their clients and employees and try to figure out the bottlenecks and inefficiencies together.

This is one of the quickest ways to boost your productivity and grow your staffing business.

This also makes KPIs less of a mandatory imposition and more of an organic part of the business that is embedded in the fabric of the organization itself.

Increasing transparency with your customers

Staffing businesses need to be transparent with their customers when it comes to certain KPIs such as interview to hire, offer to acceptance, and number of rejections.

If your KPIs show that a client is taking too long to hire a candidate even after the interview was successful, or if you see a trend that too many candidates are being rejected, it is important that you communicate this information with your customer.

By sharing the metrics, you can work with the client on improving the process and removing any inconsistencies. You can also help them understand what the industry standard for success is, and you can help them to make sure they are measuring to that.

The submission to interview KPI will tell you how quickly your customer is moving. You can share this KPI with the client and work with them on improving the process. This will also help you understand which customers are better for your business and which aren’t.

If you see rejections go up, you can go to the customer to find out the root of the problem. If you realize the pay rates are too low, you can negotiate with the customer and decrease the experience required to match the budget.

Increasing transparency with your customers can go a long way in improving brand loyalty and in helping you retain your customers.

Aligning your teams and business goals

KPIs are usually tracked from the top to the bottom of the organization, starting with the C-suite followed by VP, director, branch manager, and finally recruiters and sales managers.

Staffing businesses that make KPIs an integral, organic and transparent part of their organization can correct mistakes and remove bottlenecks quickly and are most likely to thrive in the post-Covid era that is marked with uncertainties.

Effectively tracking and measuring KPIs and working closely with the sales team, recruiters, account managers and HR managers to resolve any inefficiencies increases trust within your teams while ensuring you meet your strategic business goals.

For instance, quality of hire is a crucial KPI for all staffing and recruitment businesses. Be it agency, corporate or retail recruitment, setting the right benchmarks for candidate quality is an important KPI for everyone.

When you identify a problem or a negative trend with a KPI, you must first check for internal issues, problems with processes and teams. Once you’ve identified the source with your teams, you can then work with them to resolve the negative trends or tweak the KPI respectively.

Leaders of staffing companies need to look at all end-to-end expenses when evaluating cost per hire. They need to figure out the burden on the company by adding all the costs including payroll, overhead expenses, etc.

Most importantly, sales persons and recruiters also need to know what the cost per hire is, so this KPI too needs to be transparent.

Effectively communicating the burden on the company to your sales representatives, recruiters and HR managers helps them understand what the stakes and what the organization expects them to deliver.

Overall, sharing the right KPIs with your sales reps, recruiters, account managers, etc. is one of the easiest ways to align all the processes in your staffing business and guarantees maximum efficiency and productivity.