I want to make issue two an answer to the question I'm asked most by recruiters who want to be more data driven.
What am I supposed to be measuring?
There are so many metrics, some of which are easy to find, like time to hire, others that seem almost impossible to even define, like quality of hire.
If you don't measure enough, you can't find ways of creating the efficiencies that make more hires.
But, if you try to measure everything, you'll never get any recruitment done. You'll be lost in a sea of irrelevant data (like Charlie in his search for the elusive Pepe Silvia)
So..... whats the answer?
So, the short answer is "here you silly sausage, have my free 2024 stat sheet, huzzah!"
Contents
Page 1 - Recruiter Weekly Stats. Volume per stage per recruiter
Page 2 - Role Weekly Stats
Page 3 - Offer Data
Page 4 - Control Room
The long answer is :
You should always habitually measure the quantitative metrics of your activity, and the qualitative metrics of every offer. This gives you two things :
1. A measure of the effort taken to reach an outcome
2. A measure the quality of that outcome.
If you do this, you have 99% of what you need to succeed as a recruiter, manager or head of TA.
We tend to favour the second one because you can access it more easily from an ATS. Even if you were to track it on a spreadsheet, it's a really simple table. Every row is an offer, every column, something you want to know about the offer. Simples.
But we often aren't diligent enough when it comes to tracking our activity at every stage. How much x gets me y, how much y gets me z.
Sometimes it's because the ATS is either incapable of showing you the data, or more commonly, the governance of how you use the ATS is so poor, that the data quality is in the toilet and you just can't see any insights.
The reason this is SUPER important, is that you as a recruiter are going to be tasked with doing more and more with less and less. The only way to achieve this is either burn yourself out, or find ways of making your effort translate to more hires.
This is bigger than your current job. you should be habitually measuring your activity throughout your whole career.
Ok then, what do I mean by "activity"?
Volume - The total number of candidates at each stage in a given time frame.
Conversion - The percentage passthrough of candidates from one stage to another.
Capacity - The number of candidates that can be accommodated in each stage for a given time frame.
From these three measurements we can identify bottlenecks, calculate levels of effort, calculate throughput, make accurate forecasts against a hiring plan, identify areas of immediate improvement and identify areas of efficiency gains for you and your team to deliver.
If you do this, next time you are in a meeting with a hiring manager, or even in a job interview, instead of anecdotes and arguments from authority, you are working with hard data to display and improve your work.
Awesome Recruiter Spotlight
Every week I will use this segment to highlight a recruiter I know personally who is exceptional at what they do, and in this brutal market, is available.
Meet Matthew Parker
I first connected with Matthew last year. Every post I've read showed that Matthew is both highly intelligent and knowledgeable in the TA space. He's one of the people I regularly learn and gain insight from. Here are some hard facts.
- Matthew has led global recruiting and talent teams for four hypergrowth businesses at different stages from Series A to post-IPO at Ratesetter, Culture Amp, Zapp and Procore.
- He has led teams from 2 to 30 encompassing Recruiting, Employer Brand, Learning & Development, Employee Experience and People Operations.
- He specialises in entering ambiguous environments that require significant change management across multiple geographies and building long-term, sustainable People solutions for businesses.
So if you are a recruiter in need of a really excellent boss. Or a founder who needs some TA advice they can trust, he's available just now for remote or London based roles.
Let's do what we do best. Get the word out, comment on all his posts and generally big him up.
Well... that's issue two. I hope you get value out of the stat sheet. I'll make one for you every year. If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.
I'll see you next week!