As an HR professional, you should be able to identify and evaluate key elements in your recruitment process. A well-rounded HR professional knows that work doesn’t end at implementing strategies and processes. Rather, you need to measure how effective your standard operating procedures are to be a successful recruiter.
Among companies, 67% believe it’s important to utilize the recruitment process to secure high employee retention rates. You too can make it happen by keeping tabs of these six factors to consider when evaluating your recruitment process.
1. Time It Takes to Present Candidates
Timeliness in hiring works both ways for you and job candidates. On one hand, the longer it takes you to fill a position with the right candidate, the more it affects your company’s bottom line. You may be losing hours of productivity and money with no one or the wrong person doing the job. Moreover, a lengthy recruitment process doesn’t make a candidate think highly of your company and can be the easiest way to lose a good candidate to your competitor.
HR teams should not exceed 14 days from the time the position was first opened before being able to present at least three qualified candidates for assessment. Obviously, the shorter time it takes to present highly competent candidates, the more competitive your business could be down the line.
2. Availability of Feedback from Hiring Manager
Recruiters and hiring managers work hand in hand. The job of the recruiter is to build a pool of qualified candidates, so that you, as the hiring manager, can choose the most qualified applicant. You’ll know you are working with a good recruitment firm in the Philippines if it’s able to come up with a really solid lineup of candidates that makes it hard for you to make a hiring decision.
Then again, it’s your responsibility to give feedback about the quality of submitted or shortlisted candidates without unnecessary delay. Ideally, it should take a day or two to identify which candidate stays or can be let go of based on the background and skill set you are looking for.
You can even get department managers involved in helping you rate your feedback timeframe especially if you are hiring for positions in their respective departments. It can give you valuable insights about your overall recruitment process, whether the problem lies in talent acquisition, communication protocols or channels, or the decision-making section.
3. Outdated Requisitions
Job requisitions are documents that you use to request a hire. They may contain details like target date of onboarding, budget, and qualifications, and more.
Requisitions that have been put on the waiting list for more than a month isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as you keep them to a minimal 10-20%. Be sure there’s a good reason that a particular requisition has been placed on hold, such as budget constraints or lack of urgency to fill the vacancy.
On the other hand, when your requisitions continue to pile up over a certain period of time, it may be time for you to look into potential issues. Whether you have overloaded staff members or problems in talent sourcing, you’ll be able to identify them by monitoring the number of outdated requisitions on a weekly basis.
4. Present-to-Interview Ratio
There’s a direct relationship between the quantity and quality of candidates that you tap for recruitment. You want to attract as many high-quality candidates as possible, since it’s more likely that a good number of them will also make it to the interview stage.
However, if there’s a wide disparity between the number of candidates you engage versus those who are picked for an interview, it could mean that the screening process may not be in tune with your expectations. In such case, you might need to either reiterate the requirements to the HR team, or you could review your selection criteria.
5. Interview-to-Offer Ratio
This refers to the average number of candidates you need to interview before you can hire a successful candidate. The ideal ratio is 3:1, meaning you might need to conduct three interviews before offering someone the job.
If your interview-to-offer ratio is higher, you might want to start looking for the source of the high number of interviewees—whether the problem is in the early stages of candidate selection, the methods used to assess the candidates, or even in the final stages of evaluating your applicants.
6. Offer Acceptance Rate
Now that you’ve narrowed down the qualified candidates, given out assessment tests, and interviewed the ones with the greatest potential to be employed in your company, you are left with only one candidate. Looking back at the recruitment process, you’re sure that this person is who or what your organization needs, so you draft an attractive job offer.
How competitive should your offer be? If you’re in a cut-throat competition industry like marketing or IT, your offer acceptance rate should at least fall on the 80% range. On the other hand, if you’re recruiting for less specialized positions like administrative roles, you should be able to expect up to 95% acceptance rate.
Every month, check if you’re on track with your target offer acceptance ratio. If not, take a step back and see if you could still tweak your job offers in order for candidates to seriously consider them. You can start with checking out the competition and eventually look at the bigger picture such as what the industry standard is.
Pay Attention to Your Recruitment Process
Recruitment standards vary from industry to industry, or they may be based on the job position you’re looking to fill. Nevertheless, you can start tracking the most important elements to make sure you’re covering as many key areas as possible.
