Measuring the performance of your recruiting team can uncover strengths and pitfalls and is essential to successful recruiting processes. Understanding and leveraging the right metrics will help you manage the nuances of staffing. Recruitment teams in the staffing industry face the ongoing challenge of filling positions and ensuring their hiring process’s quality, efficiency, and effectiveness.
This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) work to drive recruitment success. Let’s dive into five essential KPIs and explore how an ATS can measure, track, optimize, and synthesize these metrics.
Tracking the activities of individual recruiters provides insights into their productivity and effectiveness. Metrics such as the number of calls made, emails sent, interviews conducted, and candidates screened offer a level of understanding of a recruiter’s efforts.
How an ATS can help: An Applicant Tracking System records and displays recruiter activity, offering visibility into each recruiter’s performance. It enables managers to understand where their team excels and where they may need help and training. A high-quality ATS will also provide intuitive dashboards and reports for managers to help track and manage goals, trends, and performance indicators.
Effective communication with candidates is critical to successful hiring. Metrics like response rates to emails or messages and candidate feedback are good indicators of a recruiter’s ability to nurture relationships while maintaining a candidate’s interest.
How an ATS can help: With CRM automation, an ATS can help streamline candidate engagement, track response rates, and log notes. Recruiters can leverage these tools to refine their communications and enhance candidate experience. Some ATS’s allow their users to define their own unique workflows, adding another layer of configuration and personalization to their engagement strategies.
This metric measures the ratio of candidates submitted by a recruiter to the number of hires made. It reflects the recruiter’s ability to identify and present qualified candidates to hiring managers and their understanding of client requirements. This ratio demonstrates the relationships between recruiter and candidate and recruiter and hiring manager.
How an ATS can help: By tracking submissions and hires within the ATS, recruiters can better manage their candidate sourcing and selection process. ATS’s may also provide a unique experience for hiring managers, further strengthening the relationship between the agency and their clients. This experience is often a mobile-friendly manager portal, increasing collaboration efforts while keeping track of activities done by both parties.
These KPIs measure the number of days from when a job is opened until a candidate accepts an offer and when the job is filled. SHRM’s latest report had the average time to fill at 47.5 days for 2023; however, this number will differ depending on your industry. An extended time to fill can be costly and may indicate inefficiencies in sourcing or screening candidates. Providing a personalized experience for your candidates during the entire recruitment process will help decrease both averages.
How an ATS can help: An Applicant Tracking System can help automate many aspects of the recruitment process, streamlining workflows and reducing time-to-offer and time-to-fill. Recruiters can utilize data tracked within an ATS to identify bottlenecks and streamline their process. ATS’s can also provide branded experiences for candidates during the application and onboarding process, which also feed data into your ATS, further helping to identify pitfalls and successes.
Beyond quantity, the quality of candidates submitted by recruiters is vital to successful placements. Metrics such as candidate retention rates and client satisfaction surveys can help shed light on the caliber of candidates presented by recruiters. If you’re in a high turnover industry, redeployment rate rather than retention rate may be a better indicator of your recruiters being able to identify high-quality candidates.
How an ATS can help: By integrating performance data and client feedback into the ATS, recruiters can measure the quality of their candidate submissions. This enables them to adjust their sourcing and screening efforts to match client expectations and ensure successful placements. Staying engaged with candidates after they’ve been placed is just as important as building relationships with candidates to set them up for future roles to be redeployed at.
Reviewing and analyzing individual recruiter performances can be daunting without the right tools and processes. An ATS provides the infrastructure to easily centralize data, generate reports, and track individual recruiter metrics. It empowers managers to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.
Furthermore, implementing ideologies like gamification elements within the ATS can foster healthy competition among recruiters. Leaderboards, rewards, and recognition for achieving performance targets help to incentivize recruiters to excel while contributing to overall team success.
By leveraging specific KPIs tailored to monitor recruiter performance and combining the capabilities of an Applicant Tracking System, staffing professionals can navigate the complexities of recruiting. At SmartSearch, we empower recruiters to nurture relationships with candidates and hiring managers while providing intuitive and easy-to-use capabilities to automate and personalize their process. Contact us today to experience how SmartSearch can help you hire better, faster, and smarter.
