Skip to content

Measuring Hiring Efficiency: 9 Metrics to Evaluate Your Recruitment Process

Why should we care about determining and evaluating metrics for your hiring process? From a new LinkedIn study measuring 15 industries, they found that the number of days to hire can add up to 33-49 in total. Once you onboard a new employee, it’s important to identify a success rate for your human capital to determine your long-term Return-on-Investment (ROI). Applying metrics throughout the recruitment, hiring process, and beyond could result in significant cost and time savings in the long run.

The process of measuring hiring efficiency can lay the foundation to identify any positive or negative trends within your current process. In other words, it will help determine what’s working well and what could be adjusted for future recruiting strategies. There are many potential metrics to consider to measure hiring efficiency, including the following:

Time to Fill 

The length of time from when you post the job to when the selected candidate has accepted your offer.

Time to Hire

The length of time from when the job is posted to the selected candidate’s start date.

Application Completion Rate

The number of candidates who started the application versus the number of candidates who completed the application. This hiring efficiency metric helps determine the ease and efficiency of your initial application intake process. 

Open Positions

The number of open positions you have at any given time. Consider what this number, in congruence with the size of your organization or current number of employees, might communicate to the talent pool. It may communicate conservative or aggressive company growth, turnover trends, departmental growth, or other factors.

Candidate / New Employee Experience

Using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure your candidate’s hiring experience throughout the hiring process or new hire experience throughout the onboarding and training process will help determine your success from a candidate and new employee perspective. The measurement is a 0-10 satisfaction rating that could be tied to follow-up questions or actions based on the response.

Cost to Hire

The total cost to hire the new employee from recruitment to when the position is filled. You could customize these metrics if you wanted to include or measure in congruence with the cost to onboard and train each new hire.

Offer Acceptance Rate

How many offers were submitted versus candidates who accepted the position. 

Quality of Hire

The metrics you’d develop post-hire in determining the employee success rate. Factors or measurements to include could be satisfaction, influence on company culture, employee engagement, success within the position, etc. This could be measured in surveys and evaluations. This is a more qualitative, longer-term KPI to your hiring efficiency metrics. 

Turnover Rate

The employee count versus the total number of terminations within a given period. Hiring efficiency models also factor in the success of the employees throughout the employment lifetime. If your organization is experiencing a high turnover rate, that may be an indicator to evaluate the quality of hires and how you are recruiting these individuals.

There are many other metrics for hiring efficiency to consider, including cost per hire and other expenses, source cost and success, percentage of movement through, or amount of time spent on each stage of the recruitment process.

Each organization’s metrics and KPIs for measuring hiring efficiency can be different based on their size, industry, and pain points. Cangrade’s Workforce Success Model approach is one example of a tool that can build meaningful measurements to leverage the specific data you want to evaluate.