While attracting and finding the right candidate is a task in itself, retaining them is even harder. Metrics like time to hire and cost per hire are closely linked with retention rates. After all, it would seem counter-intuitive to track the efficiency of the hiring process if candidates decide to leave an organization before recruitment efforts even start to pay off.
Learn the Pipeline Reporting method
Collecting data for a pipeline report is easy, and offers you a shorter time-frame to do so. Once you start creating your pipeline, you can begin collecting information that is pertinent to hiring managers and their recruiting funnel. The below headings give an overview of some of the data you can track in a pipeline report.
1. Always learn from the past (data)
It’s helpful to pull historical data on how previous roles have performed in the past. Knowing this allows you to make educated guesses about candidate needs for each stage of the hiring process and decide when to reduce your sourcing efforts and push funding into candidates who are already in the pipeline. Understanding how many candidates you’ll need in each stage can help you dial back sourcing efforts when the competition is particularly fierce, so that your team can focus on people who are already in the pipeline.
2. Conversion rates must not be too high or too low
The highest conversion rates are achieved when candidates move through your intake process in a way that is efficient, effective and easy to digest. Too many questions lead to a low conversion rate. The heavier the flow of questions and complexity, the more likely you’ll lose candidates, resulting in lower conversions and ROI for your organization
3. Number of days in each stage
​​Knowing how long candidates are spending in the take-home test stage is important to your recruiting process, but this can be difficult to measure. This metric allows you to see how quickly candidates are moving from one stage to the next and keep an eye on coordinator efficiency through the pipeline. This metric is pretty self-explanatory: It allows you to see how quickly candidates are moving from one stage to the next. This metric measures the average number of days in process that a candidate stays in an active role. It is an important estimate of how quickly candidates move through stages, and thus an indicator of how well your pipeline is performing.
4. Total amount of time given
The total hours metric gives you a way to calculate your team’s projected effort for one hire. It takes the number of hours it takes to conduct initial screns and multiplies it by the number of roles you have open. We’ve found this metric is useful in setting expectations with hiring managers when you schedule new hires and when they have questions about workload expectations, if applicable.
This metric is one that can be used to help interviewers and hiring managers understand the amount of work needed to conduct initial screens. If, for example, an interviewer only needs to conduct 5 initial screens, it can help them plan out their time accordingly since they’ll have more time to spend interviewing candidates than if they're conducting too many. This is another metric that can be used in conjunction with others that reveal how much time it takes for a specific stage to complete on average.