How Can You Improve Your Recruiting Process with Activity Ratios?

staffing activity ratios

How do you measure recruiting productivity? Most firms track fill rate, hit rate, and time-to-fill, but it’s important to have a truly comprehensive view into your team’s activity. And that means going beyond baseline ratios. If your firm regularly tracks volume totals like job orders, submissions, interviews, and placements, you can find inefficiencies without relying standard measurements of success. Divide placements by interviews, for instance, to evaluate the quality of the candidates you submit to clients. Or divide submissions by total job orders to determine if your recruiters are spread too thin to devote sufficient time to each opportunity.

Company-wide understanding of recruiting productivity benefits everyone. Leaders can use both traditional and advanced metrics to get the most possible efficiency from their recruiters, and recruiters themselves can reflect on their own contributions with a quantitative eye. But what practical actions can recruiting firms take with activity ratios at their disposal?

1. Coaching

Every recruiter has his or her personal biases and preferences when it comes to getting work done. Some of these preferences are near universal: when asked to rank fill rate, hit rate, and time-to-fill, 57 percent of respondents from staffing and recruiting firms ranked fill rate as the most important metric.

Source: Bullhorn 2016 North American Staffing and Recruiting Trends Survey

But recruiting managers must recognize the need to step in when recruiters aren’t effectively managing their strengths and weaknesses, especially if the problem is influenced by reliance on insufficient metrics. Fill rate, for instance, is obviously important, but it’s even more important to know why a recruiter’s fill rate is exceeding or failing to meet expectations. And that knowledge can remain hidden if you don’t go beyond the basic ratios.

2. Structure for Visibility

Do the recruiters on your team know how their fellow recruiters are performing against their goals? Total visibility and transparency into performance and progress are scary ideas, but they’re also highly beneficial for recruiting companies. But this kind of visibility can really only be grasped by using world-class technology, like a recruitment CRM. Without the deep relationship-based insights that industry technology like this can provide, your firm might be left in the dark.

3. Financial Correlation

Staffing activity ratios exist for good reason: they have the power to indicate success and light the path along the way. Of firms that had a fill rate of less than 50 percent in 2015, only 37 percent exceeded their annual revenue goals. On the other side of the coin, of firms whose fill rate was at 50 percent or higher by the end of 2015, 46 percent exceeded revenue goals.

Source: Bullhorn 2016 North American Staffing and Recruiting Trends Survey

If you can effectively communicate this message of positive financial correlation to recruiting success to your team, you could drive greater motivation (especially if recruiter compensation has a direct relationship with firm performance: 90 percent of recruiters expect their compensation to increase in 2016).

Wendy Kennah, Director of Recruiting for Procom, recently began to use an applicant tracking system to “combine performance activities with actual financial data to show how recruiters can hit financial targets by working towards activity metrics.” This practice led to Procom’s “most successful year to date” in terms of recruiter performance. Your firm can do the same if you take the proper steps.

To read more about how you can improve your recruiting team’s productivity with activity ratios and other tools, download 3 Ways to Increase Your Recruiting Team’s Productivity today!

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