Stop Using These Recruitment Vanity Metrics Today
Today’s recruiters are highly competitive and fast-paced when it comes to hiring top talent. They use highly competitive and insightful recruitment metrics to support their decision-making process. However, in this race of being data-driven, recruiters sometimes make the mistake of relying on wrong metrics.
These metrics might provide data that does not portray the clear picture of your hiring process. Such misleading information could hamper your recruitment leading to severe losses. These are called recruitment vanity metrics.
What are vanity metrics?
These are surface-level metrics that don’t generally offer insightful data about your recruitment process and can be easily manipulated. As they lack in-depth information, they don’t necessarily help in achieving your recruitment goals.
Now that you know what are recruitment vanity metrics, here are top five recruitment metrics that you should avoid using in your report to get more accurate results. These are the metrics that recruiters usually include in their reports.
Total number of applicants
Most recruiters believe, the more number of applicants, the better hiring for any open position. However, the total number of applicants does not portray a clear picture when it comes to assessing the hiring efforts. For instance, if you hire for a position of senior, the number of applicants will be low comparatively when you hire for, let’s say a marketing executive.
The job of the recruiter is to attract quality candidates rather high number of applicants. If you receive many applications of undesirable candidates, you will be less productive as your time will be wasted on unqualified candidates.
Number of hires
At first go, the total number of hires seems to be a great metric to be included in the hiring report. Traditional wisdom says if there are a significant number of hires, the recruiter has done a commendable job. But, the metric tells you very little about your hiring efficiency.
Although it might look great in the report, the total number of hires does not display the quality of candidates that your company has hired. There might be chances that these people might not be the right choices and come out to be less productive. In the worst case, they might also leave your company within a month. This could severely hamper your company’s productivity and performance
Time to fill
Time to fill is amongst the most used recruitment metrics that shines on every recruitment report. Although it could be helpful in certain situations, the time to fill metric has its own shortcomings. For instance, the recruitment metric can calculate the average time to fill for analyzing the total hiring time, but it has to do nothing with the quality of hire. What if the person that your recruiter has selected does not perform up to the mark? Would hiring someone quickly will benefit here? The answer is obviously ‘no.’
Employment cost
Employment cost is a crucial metric which needs to be measured to support future planning decisions. It would help companies to analyze the amount of fund + the sources through which the money will be generated. However, ‘employment cost’ much not be included in the key performance indicators as it can be easily manipulated and does not show accurate results.
The metric focuses more on cost than the quality of the source. It might not bother a recruiter to pay extra if the source provides excellent candidates for the open positions.
Website traffic
Website traffic is a commonly used recruitment vanity metric which offers only surface-level details. A spike in the user traffic on your website’s career page might seem a great sign but could be highly misleading. As it might be possible that most of them were just looking for some information and only some of them were looking for jobs.
Instead of website traffic, conversion rate should be the key metric that you should look for as a recruiter. This way you will target the right audience and save your time and money.
Recruitment vanity metrics could be used to assess certain aspects of the hiring process, but they must not be used as key parameters for analyzing hiring performance. We know they are easy to reckon and make your recruitment efforts seem more successful. But, measuring hiring success rate using these metrics is not a good idea. What you can do is to incorporate these recruitment metrics in your report to publish more accurate results.
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