The state of talent acquisition right now is like everything in an employees’ market: tough for employers. If you want to be a competitive force, you'll need a great strategy behind you. To do so, you need to add recruiting KPI’s to the HR metrics you measure. 

This guide outlines everything you need to know about talent acquisition metrics, analysis, and best practices. We also talk about the eight key metrics you should measure if you want to improve your recruiting practices and hire exceptional talent this year and beyond.

What are talent acquisition metrics?

Talent acquisition metrics are the cold, hard facts that measure the effectiveness of your recruiting and hiring process. By measuring specific metrics, you glean insights and pinpoints to where you can strategically pick up the slack. 

Essentially, talent acquisition metrics are about making sure you're doing everything right to get the best people on your team.

Why talent acquisition metrics and analysis matters

Analyzing talent acquisition metrics helps you refine your recruitment strategy and get great talent on board. With the right employees, you'll be able to create positive change within your workforce and establish the thriving culture you want.

Plus, knowing how you can better allocate your recruiting resources will ultimately save you time and money, not to mention the morale of your employees carrying the load of empty positions. 

8 talent acquisition metrics to measure

How you measure talent acquisition effectiveness will depend on the specifics of your company, your workforce, and your hiring and recruiting goals. But generally speaking, if you use the following eight metrics, you’ll be able to maintain a solid pulse on the state of your talent acquisition. 

1. Hiring diversity 

Hiring diversity is a merit-based approach. It’s designed to eliminate bias towards personal characteristics that are irrelevant to the candidates' ability to perform the role. This could be things like age, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and/or health. 

Now you're hiring from a larger and wide-ranging pool of candidates. This is important morally of course, but it also has a business benefit because it gives your team diverse perspectives, cultural awareness, experiences, skills and approaches. 

This variety naturally lends itself to more diverse ideas, problem-solving and innovation. Diverse companies are:

• 35% more profitable than non-diverse companies
• 70% more likely to capture new market share 
• More appealing to 3 in 4 job seekers

2. Time to fill

This acquisition metric is defined by the time it takes from listing an open position until the vacancy is filled. 

Optimizing time to fill is a balancing act: you want your hiring process to be thorough, but you also don't want great candidates losing interest or being snapped up elsewhere.

Check out your industry average. This will give you some data to benchmark yourself against. You want to know where you sit against your competitors, and ideally, improve upon their time. 

Ultimately though, quality of hire is more important than time to fill. So don't compromise your process just to speed it up. Metrics 4 and 6 on our list will give you some insight into what parts of your hiring process you can trim and what needs to stay. 

3. Quality of hire 

Quality of hire is largely about how well the candidate fulfills the position requirements.

You can measure this through factors like: 

• Performance in role
• Manager satisfaction
• Career progression
• Company tenure 

However, since you're hiring a human being, they will also bring unique value you can't write into a job description. This is trickier to gauge, yet it's certainly worth trying to measure any unexpected usefulness your hires bring to your company. 

To do this, you’ll need to add talent acquisition metrics that look beyond role-specific qualifications, such as an employee’s ability to advance company goals or their contribution to company culture. 

4. Time in process

Time in process is the time your applicants spend in each hiring stage. Drilling down into how long each hiring stage takes will give you the specificity to make educated changes. You want to know exactly where the bottlenecks are and get them flowing ASAP. 

Different stages of the hiring process to look at might include:

• Phone screening 
• Aptitude tests
• Technical tests
• Personality tests
• Communication skill tests
• In-person interviews 
• Background and reference checks

The turnaround between these phases is crucial too. Job hunting isn't the most fun pursuit, so chances are if your applicants are looking, it's because they need to find something. Leaving them hanging for too long is just asking for them to look elsewhere. 

5. Cost per hire 

Cost per hire is no mystery. It’s how much each hire costs your company – the sum of things like:

• Sourcing costs
• Travel costs
• Relocation costs
• Agency fees

To figure out your average cost per hire, add up all your hiring costs during a certain time period and divide them by your total hires during that same period of time. 

All these talent acquisition metrics work in symbiosis: if you have an efficient process, it will cost you less to hire because you don't need to spend as many resources or as much time. And if the quality of your hire is better, you won't be forking out money to start the whole process again a few months later.

6. Offer acceptance rate 

Your offer acceptance rate is quantified by the difference between how many offers you give out and how many of those offers are accepted. How your offer acceptance rate measures up is a good indicator of how competitive your talent acquisition is. 

If you discover your offer acceptance rate low, try the following: 

Make sure your salaries are competitive

Take a hard look at both your salary ranges as well as the compa ratio for your most recent hires. If you don’t stack up to your competitors, this could be a huge factor affecting your offer acceptance rate.

Undertake gap analysis on your workplace culture and reputation 

Do some due diligence to figure out how you are perceived by potential recruits. Have a look at how employees talk about you on Glassdoor and other employer review platforms. 

Asses your job descriptions

Review your job descriptions from the applicant’s perspective. Eliminate any confusing or irrelevant information. Make sure the role is clear and accurate. 

Check out the competition 

Have a look at what is on offer at other companies. Do they offer more schedule flexibility or remote work options? Do they offer perks your company doesn’t? See what you're lacking and promote where you're ahead.

7. Sourcing channel effectiveness

This measures the effectiveness of the platforms you use to advertise open positions, like social media and job boards. By assessing the quality of each channel, you can figure out which ones are worthwhile and which are costing you time and money. 

There are so many routes to source talent. By trialing a variety and measuring the candidate quality and quantity, you can figure out the best ROI. 

8. Retention rate 

Your employee retention rate is arguably the most important measure of your talent acquisition strategy. After all, you're not optimizing your talent acquisition strategy so that you can enjoy a very productive, constant state of acquiring talent. 

No, you're optimizing your talent acquisition strategy to build a culture of excellence. And this is done with great team members who stick around and become seasoned professionals at their job and at your company.

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