When you are hiring to fill critical positions for your company, you want easy access to basic metrics that can indicate your campaign’s progress and your recruiting performance. Keeping an eye on the performance of your operational activities such as the impact of job posts, social sharing and employee referrals – is an important part of keeping the process on track. With the help of a modern SaaS recruiting platform with advanced analytics, accurate measurements of that progress can be at your fingertips. Here are five things to look for when measuring your day to day recruiting performance metrics.
Do the right people know about your open jobs? Are you getting enough traffic to your job pages and especially the critical positions that you need to fill this month? How do you make sure that your jobs are getting enough visibility and that they are getting in front of the type of talent that you want to target? While this seems pretty straight forward to aim for higher job visibility and more traffic to your jobs, it doesn’t happen on its own. However, this measure of your recruiting performance is also easy to track and manage when you drive your hiring process from a cloud-based hiring platform that can show you these stats at any time and from anywhere.
Not getting as many views as you’d like? To increase exposure, it helps to think of the job posting as a campaign: it must be expertly marketed and distributed with some target metrics in mind. What is required of the candidate and what makes the position desirable should be succinctly expressed. This ad should then be posted on your website’s career page as well as popular job boards. Ensure that your career page is easy to navigate to – professionals even suggest that in addition to having its own menu on the homepage, your career page should be linked to other subpages as well.
Here is where things become a bit less cut-and-dry. If few to no applications are received, the issue is clear – you have a shallow talent pool to choose from. When the number is extremely high, however, it poses a different problem altogether. If the job ad for a position at your company brings in 1,000 applications in the first week, it becomes near impossible to efficiently sort through them all when you are relying on a manual and sequential process. More importantly, however, is the fact that with an overwhelmingly large application sample there is a high likelihood of many of them being completely wrong for the job.
One strategic recruiting expert pegged 50-60 applicants as being the norm in most instances, while on the high end the number could climb into the hundreds. While this will change depending on the size and profile of the company, taking this into consideration helps clarify what a reasonable expectation should be. Analytics can then help you figure out whether you’re on the right track, may have to adjust the job description or perhaps be more selective in your marketing (where the job is posted). Another way to make the application process more selective is by embedding a set of mandatory and targeted questions designed to bring in only the most relevant applicants.
Keeping track of how many applications are reviewed daily can also shed light on your recruiting performance. Are you able to review the new applications that are coming in every day? Do you have a method to quickly scan through the incoming batch and make a fast decision to move the respective applicants further in your hiring pipeline? When your best approach to this review process is a single-threaded manual process, chances are that you will quickly fall behind and there will be a large growing queue of new applications waiting to be reviewed. With Simplicant, you and your select team members can quickly review this queue and keep the process moving forward at a brisk pace.
When you start receiving a healthy number of incoming applications but are having a tough time finding relevant candidates you may need to take another look at your job description. It’s likely that your job ad needs a bit of tweaking. You can certainly get a better measure of this by looking at the number of new applications that are progressed. If the percentage is extremely low, your job description and targeting may need some work.
A hiring workflow must be a model of efficiency. While there must be checks and balances, it should not go through so many steps as to become overly complex. The goal should be to fully complete all necessary steps involving all necessary staff while avoiding redundancy. More importantly, track the time it is taking to process through each stage of your hiring pipeline. Are you spending too much time reviewing new applications? Or it it the in-person interview that is taking too long to schedule and complete?
Your goal is to keep the process moving forward at a fast pace. Recruiting software such as Simplicant will clearly highlight where the bottlenecks are so you can focus on those parts of the process and make them more efficient. Should your analytics show that several delays are due to lack of coordination and collaboration capabilities, you can address this recruiting performance issue quickly with the help of a cloud-based collaborative platform such as Simplicant. A collaborative platform not only allows mutiple people to participate from wherever they are, it actually makes the process smarter, more meaningful and faster at the same time.
When attempting to attract top talent, an email inviting and a single interview isn’t sufficient in these competitive times. It’s important to take stock of whether you’re piquing the candidate’s interest and building a relationship through sustained interaction.
Your analytics should show a story of consistent engagement with your candidates. Further, keeping in touch with elsewhere employed talent through occasional company updates and milestone announcements can mean when they’re looking for a new home, your organization is the first on their mind. A platform that includes Candidate Relationship Management capabilities ensures that your interaction with candidates, both short and long term, is perfectly designed to capture the right metrics and maximize recruiting performance.
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