Analysing your data helps you make informed decisions and improvements to your recruitment strategy, so it’s more efficient and aligned with your business goals.
How effective is your recruitment strategy?
First, make sure you understand how your existing recruitment strategy is working. You can start by tracking the right data to see how your strategy is performing at every stage of the process.
| Metric | What does it tell you? | Why is it important? |
| Time to offer | The number of days from when you first post a job to when a candidate accepts an offer. | To know how efficient your recruitment process is. Longer hire times means there could be more setbacks along the way, for example, slow decision-making or struggling finding candidates. |
| Cost per hire | How much you spend on the process of hiring a new employee. |
It reveals the financial efficiency of your recruitment process. This includes your own talent team salaries, recruitment tools and systems such as applicant tracking systems, legal costs, relocation, visas and money spent on external resources (eg recruitment agencies). |
| Source of interviews | Where your successful applicants are coming from. This includes social media, job boards, direct applications or referrals. | It allows you to focus your efforts and resources more efficiently on the channels that bring you the best candidates. |
| Candidate drop-off rates |
The percentage of candidates that drop out during each stage of the hiring process. |
It helps reveal any problem points during specific stages of the hiring process that cause candidates to drop out. For example, lengthy or irrelevant processes. |
| Probation pass rate |
The performance of new hires after their first months. |
An effective recruitment process leads to higher quality new hires. This data can be gathered through performance reviews, employee productivity and how they work with other team members. |
| Offer acceptance rate |
The percentage of candidates who accepted a job offer and the reasons why they declined. These could include salary, career aspirations, working patterns (hybrid/remote), counteroffer and no response or withdrawal without contact. | To help identify and remove issues that might be causing low acceptance rates. For example, a poor candidate experience or uncompetitive salaries. |
| Diversity metrics |
The diversity of your candidates. |
To make sure you are attracting a broad range of talent. |
| Early attrition rates |
How long your hires stay with your company. |
To identify and remove any issues that could cause high turnover, for example, workplace environment issues, poor onboarding experience or expectations of the job not being met. |
Make data-driven improvements to your strategies
Once you’re tracking the right data, you can then start to optimise the process by making adjustments to the various stages.
- Review your recruitment funnel data: This can help you discover exactly where along the entire process you can make improvements. For example, review and optimise your interview procedure if you notice candidates are dropping out at that stage.
- Improve candidate sourcing channel: Once you’ve reviewed your source of hire metrics, you can focus your budget and investments on the channels that bring you the highest quality candidates. Check out our sourcing strategy guide for more information.
- Fine-tune job descriptions: Make sure they are clear and accurately reflect the role. You can target and attract more suitable candidates by using applicant quality data to improve the language on the job descriptions, including titles, responsibilities and skills required.
- Improve time to hire: If your recruitment process is taking longer than industry benchmarks, or causing higher than normal candidate drop-off rates, review each step to see where you can make improvements and make your process more competitive. For example, you can analyse decision-making times or number of interview rounds.
- Provide a positive candidate experience: Drop-off and offer-acceptance rates can help detect any issues in the experience you provide to candidates going through the recruitment process. Review applicants’ feedback to spot opportunities on how to improve the way you communicate with candidates and to make sure your interview process and communications give a clear understanding of the role, company values and ways of working. Learn more about creating a positive candidate experience.
- Improve the competitiveness of your offer: If your offer acceptance rates are low, check if the salaries and compensation packages are competitive to attract the best talent. This includes reviewing how candidates can progress in their careers with your company, bonuses and flexibility. Make sure to benchmark salaries and benefits against market data and industry standards.
- Improve diversity in your workplace: If you have low diversity metrics, you can review and make improvements to how you source candidates and how you write job descriptions to make sure your strategy isn’t inadvertently preventing diverse candidates from applying. Another measure you can consider is hiring a professional organisation to provide training on unconscious bias for your recruitment team.
- Tweak your onboarding process: Review your onboarding process to see how it can be improved, particularly if you notice lower retention rates during the first year of employment. A good onboarding strategy is key to helping new team members integrate and increase job satisfaction.
If you want to learn how to benchmark accurately against the London scaleup market, reach out to our team.
Using data for continuous improvement
To ensure that your recruitment strategies remain effective and aligned with your company’s goals, it’s crucial to continuously analyse and act on the data you collect.
Here’s how to make the most of your data:
- Regular data reviews: establish a routine for reviewing recruitment metrics, such as monthly or quarterly, depending on your hiring volume. This allows you to spot trends and issues early and make timely adjustments.
- Benchmarking: compare your metrics against industry standards or historical data within your company. This helps to understand how your recruitment process stacks up and where improvements are necessary. If you’d like to know more about how to benchmark for the roles you need, get in touch with our team.
- Iterative testing: implement changes based on data insights and then test their impact. For example, if you tweak job descriptions or sourcing strategies, monitor the subsequent changes in application quality or quantity. This iterative approach ensures that you're tracking outcomes from the enhancements made and achieving the desired improvements.
- Collaborative analysis: involve key stakeholders, such as hiring managers, HR and recruitment teams, in your data analysis. Their insights can help contextualise the data and ensure that any adjustments align with broader business goals.
- Leverage technology: use applicant tracking systems (ATS) and recruitment analytics tools to automate data collection and analysis. These tools can provide real-time insights and help you make data-driven decisions more efficiently. There is a wide range of ATS solutions to choose from, as well as new ones being developed constantly, each providing valuable recruitment metrics.
Get every step of the hiring process right by following our hiring success guide, or if you're ready to move to the next steps, take a look at our interview guide and how to make an offer.