This is part II of a post on measuring recruiter effectiveness (part I can be found here).

One of the most common questions I get asked when I am doing talent acquisition process optimization with a client is “how do you measure recruiter productivity”?  It is a great question particularly if you want to get the ROI out of doing any kind of TA optimization.

I always recommend two metrics that every company should have in place (there are always situational specific or company specific metrics that can be added).  They are Customer Satisfaction and Time to Accept.

The second metric that I recommend to all my clients is time to accept. Time to accept, of course, is an age-old metric used within talent acquisition. In the aggregate, it is a very general metric.  You may have a time to accept target of 60 days and looking across your recruiters you can see which recruiters are meeting the target and which are not.    Oftentimes you get push back from recruiters because of its generic nature.   You are taking positions that fill in 30 days (such as an administrative assistant position) and mashing that in with a position that takes 90 days to fill (such as a senior data architect position). And, you will have businesses that do a lot of hiring across the spectrum that will point out that it is your senior data architects fills that are not delivering on their need (although in the example above the 60 day TtA has been met).

Recruiters will also push back pointing out that they hire a higher percentage of positions that are hard to fill.  They will say that this is an unfair metric to hold them to 60 days when the average days to fill a senior data architect position is 90 days.

These are factual objections to the time to accept metric.

The way I advise clients to address this is by using job segmentation.  With Job segmentation, you use a 2 by 2 matrix.  Positions are segmented by Frequency of Hire and Uniqueness of Skill Set (I have also used Applicant Volume and Complexity to Fill).

For example, the administrative assistance would probably be in the one quadrant and the senior data architect would be in the four quadrant.

Once you have segmented the roles into one of the four quadrants you then modify the time to accept target to reflect the complexity of the hiring engagement.  An administrative assistant could be 45 days in the one quadrant and a senior data architect could be 90 days in the 4th quadrant.

With this type of role segmentation, you can get a much more granular view of recruiter effectiveness.  You can review TtA by recruiter by quadrant.  This can also be helpful to identify recruiter areas of strength and areas for development.  This approach is also helpful in identifying problem areas within the business where you are not meeting the target TtA.

For example, you may find that a function or business is not delivering on their quadrant one rolls at 45 days.  Upon deeper analysis and VOC you may find that the failure is because they're actually looking for over qualified candidates and they are having difficulty getting those candidates to either accept or the candidates are not interested in interviewing because the salary is too low

By doing TtA by the job segmentation approach you get much more clarity in terms of how well each of your recruiters and the organization is hitting their target.  Job segmentation can also define much more acceptable cost of vacant position analysis.

So, in closing, my recommendation to any organization that has . . .

• Too many metrics in place
• Does not know what to focus on, or
• Do not have recruiter or recruiting organizational metrics in place

focus on these two.  These two have the highest ROI and they allow you to identify areas within the business that are pinch points or problem areas. They also allow you to identify individuals within your recruiting team that are delivering customer satisfaction and providing value creation to the business in a timely fashion.