High-Volume Hiring Metrics Recruiters Need to Know
When HR teams need to make a lot of hires at once, the right metrics are crucial.
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The field of recruiting and hiring is always changing and businesses are constantly coming up with new techniques and strategies to help them stay ahead of their competitors and get the best talent before someone else does. Because of this, there are many different recruiting strategies that businesses can try to create a more effective recruiting or hiring system for their company. But how can you know which strategies are more effective than others? Simple, by tracking performance metrics.
What does this mean? Essentially, keeping track of metrics helps you test different strategies and allows your business to learn which strategies work best for you and your recruiting processes. Recruiters, whether they are recruiting for top-of-the-market businesses or high-turnover positions, face incredible challenges when it comes to finding and contacting the most qualified candidates quickly and efficiently. This is especially true in high-volume recruiting processes because there are so many candidates to review.
Now, in order to determine how if your recruiting methods are improving your ROI, there are a number of important metrics to track and compare as you evolve your recruiting process. Some of the most important of these metrics are quality-of-hire, sourcing stats, applicant drop-off rate, time-to-fill, time-to-hire, and cost-per-hire. Tracking all of these metrics can seem like a lot of work, but in the long run, knowing just how each hiring strategy works and performs can be incredibly valuable. To ensure that you are coming up with the best strategy it can be important to detail clear candidate requirements, use data to inform your strategies, work to mitigate unconscious biases, and use the right technology systems — such as automated solutions to interviewing.
There are a number of challenges that come with high-volume recruiting. Unlike normal recruiting periods, high-volume recruiting requires recruiters to find dozens of qualified candidates within hundreds of applications. This can be nearly impossible without the right tools that can help recruiters quickly and effectively assess candidate applications without requiring the recruiters to spend time individually reviewing and comparing each one.
In high-volume recruiting examples where companies do not use the necessary tools, recruiters can, indeed, oftentimes find themselves completely burnt out and not even have anything to show for it. This is because modern tools, like Qualifi’s on-demand phone interview platform, are made to keep up with hundreds of applications and interview responses and humans are not. Humans simply cannot process all of that information as quickly as a machine can. That being said, machines can be great for helping recruiters to focus on the most-qualified candidates by flagging applications that use certain keywords, but recruiters are still needed to actually properly assess the candidates. But, with a platform like Qualifi, you can be sure that your recruiting team will not be wasting their time focusing on applications of underqualified candidates and rather focus their attention and energy on contacting the more promising candidates.
One of the hardest parts of recruiting is ensuring that you are able to put enough time into candidate sourcing while not detracting from all of the other responsibilities that you have — such as identifying and interviewing the high-quality candidates that you will want to push through your hiring processes. In order to give yourself more time to focus on improving your candidate sourcing, you need to figure out ways that reduce your time-to-hire and give you some time back each day. Luckily, there are a number of tools and software solutions, like Qualifi, that can do just that. By opting for an on-demand phone interview platform like Qualifi you can completely eliminate the time-consuming process of scheduling and conducting interviews and review candidates in just 3-5 minutes.
This way, you can focus your attention on tracking quality-of-source and cost-per-hire so that you can improve your recruiting system, save money, and figure out the best places to advertise to get the most out of your candidate sourcing. Rather than simply relying on sending out more advertisements to larger groups of people, tracking metrics and establishing your best audiences can really help you to easily improve the quality of candidates that are applying and help you more effectively target candidates who are going to be the best fits for your open positions.
One of the most important aspects of the hiring process for recruiters and candidates alike is the time-to-hire. Essentially this term describes the time it takes for the candidate to be processed through the hiring process — from applying to completing interviews and being hired for a position. Another similar term is time-to-fill. This term refers to the time that it takes to actually fill the position — essentially from when the hiring manager submits a request for a candidate to be hired to when that candidate accepts the job offer.
Both of these “time-to” aspects of the hiring process are incredibly important but from a recruiter perspective, the time-to-hire is the aspect to focus on. This is because the time-to-fill is largely determined by the candidate, not the hiring team whereas the time-to-hire is largely determined by the recruiting team. Now, the candidate is of course a part of this process and the time is not only defined by the recruiting team but there are oftentimes far more devastating losses that can come from a long time-to-hire than a time-to-fill for recruiters. The main issues that a slow time-to-hire can cause are loss of revenue, high cost for contract or temporary work, costs of overtime, insufficient use of time, lack of employee retention, and other long-term expenses as well.
Another metric that can be important to keep track of when it comes to improving your hiring and recruiting systems is the interview-to-hire ratio. What is this ratio and why is it so important to measure? Well, in simple terms, this ratio shows how successful your recruiting efforts are currently and if they could be improved for the future. The interview-to-hire ratio takes into account the number of conversations your recruiting and hiring teams have with candidates and compares this to the number of hires that you actually make.
To understand this ratio, you need to know what a high ratio and low ratio mean for your recruiting efforts. A high interview-to-hire ratio can mean that you may end up spending too much time interviewing candidates for each position you need to be filled. This can lead to a hard time identifying candidates that are the most qualified which can, in turn, lead to missing out on some amazing talent due to a hiring process that is simply too long because it is including too many candidates. Having a low ratio, on the other hand, could be representative of not spending enough time on interviews with candidates and therefore you are not giving your recruiting team the opportunity to find the best talent before hiring candidates to fill positions.
High-volume recruiting requires a different approach than normal recruiting does. This is because, unlike normal recruiting periods, high-volume recruiting is looking for multiple candidates to hire rather than just one or two. This means that recruiters are not simply focusing on finding the best single candidate to pass on to hiring managers, but instead, they need to find a group of highly-qualified candidates that are all being considered for hire. This means even more pressure on recruiters and oftentimes a high number of no-shows, reschedules, and cancellations for them to deal with.
Now, because high-volume recruiting is used by many companies today, there are a number of strategies that recruiters can use to make this recruitment process better and less stressful. The first strategy is to do your research and work on good candidate sourcing techniques that get quality candidates coming your way. After that, make sure you are prepared for each day of reviewing interviews by prepping and make sure that you are tracking your metrics. And, possibly the most helpful solution for high-volume recruiting is to use an automated interview platform, like Qualifi, to easily and quickly conduct hundreds of screening interviews asynchronously. This means all you need to do is focus on reviewing those that have been flagged as the most promising and you’ll be all set to start passing those high-quality candidates to your hiring managers for job offers.
