Recruitment Analytics: Unlocking Data-Driven Hiring Success

Recruiting and hiring the right talent is an imperative mission for any organization. This is why recruiters are usually the first role in HR that newly founded organizations hire for.

So what is recruitment analytics? And how can you adopt a data-driven approach to hiring and retaining top talent for your organization? Keep reading for everything you need to know. ⬇️

What is recruitment analytics?

Recruitment analytics is the practice of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data gathered throughout the hiring process to identify trends and patterns. It allows organizations to make informed decisions and optimize their recruitment strategies to improve hiring efficiency and the quality of candidates. Additionally, recruitment analytics is essential because recruiting is costly.

Typical costs to recruit a new employee can include:

• Recruiter salary
• Contract for external recruiters
• Time from the hiring manager
• Advertising on job boards
• Background checks
• Pre-employment assessments
• Travel expenses for interviews
• Employee referral bonuses
• Onboarding costs
• Training programs
• Potential relocation costs for certain positions 

The Society for Human Resource Management estimates the average cost of recruiting a new employee at $4,700. However, this cost could also be significantly higher, particularly for positions requiring advanced skills or during tight job markets. In these cases, recruitment costs can sometimes amount to several times the employee’s salary. These high costs make it essential to analyze your recruitment processes and outcomes.

Key recruitment metrics for modern HR teams

Thanks to data and emerging technologies such as AI, the modern recruiter can now invest time predicting trends, shaping talent strategies, and solving complex organizational problems.

Recruitment analytics tools can provide recruiters with an intuitive, single place to analyze recruitment data. These tools can also combine recruitment data with other important HR metrics to paint the complete picture of how hiring impacts the business.

Essential recruitment metrics to evaluate the hiring process include:  

• Total requisitions shows the number of approved positions to be filled. This metric helps us understand hiring demand and allocate resources.
• Total filled requisitions indicate the number of successfully filled positions, which highlights the recruiting team’s effectiveness in meeting recruitment goals.
• Total open requisitions shows the number of unfilled roles. It helps identify hiring bottlenecks and resource gaps.
• Percent requisitions filled in under 50 days measures the speed of filling roles. A high percentage reflects efficient hiring processes.
• Open requisitions by recruiter per month shows each recruiter’s workload, an essential data point to track to balance recruiter capacity.
• Acceptance rate measures the percentage of accepted job offers. A low rate could point to issues with compensation or candidate experience.
• Average time to fill tracks the average days to fill a role. A short time to fill means positive effects on productivity, hiring costs, and competitive hiring. Metrics closely related to this one are time to hire and time to start.
• Recruitment costs analyze the expenses associated with recruiting qualified candidates for a job opening.
• Hiring costs refer to the resources used to recruit, hire, onboard, and train new employees.
• Cost per Hire (CPH): The average amount spent on new hires over a particular period.

Download: Talent Acquisition Dashboards for HR Leaders

Post-hiring recruitment metrics to measure.

Once you’ve hired the right talent, how are they impacting your overall business strategy? Do they perform well? Are you able to retain new hires? These are business questions your executive team cares about.

Some pivotal post-hiring metrics include:

• Failed hires metric shows the number of hires that left the organization within 12 months after hiring.
• Hire fail rate analyzes the number of hires that left the organization within 12 months after hiring as a percentage of all hires over the same time period.
• First-year turnover rate is the number of hires that left the organization within 12 months after hiring as a percentage of total employees.
• Performance score is a rating of the employee’s performance. Organizations can review whether recruited talent performs well by connecting it specifically to hires.
• Source channel performance is a reasonably straightforward metric for determining which recruitment channels perform best in sourcing new hires. It requires reviewing the other metrics in this list per channel.
• Internal hire % shows the rate of internal hires (vs. external hires) and can highlight strong or weak internal career mobility, shed light on learning and development opportunities, and reduce onboarding needs.

Another smart way to examine post-hiring metrics could be to analyze which skills are leaving the organization. This ensures that your hiring plans are fit to meet your business’s future needs.

The above is just a selection of recruitment metrics. To optimize the process, you can even dig deeper and go into every recruitment stage (e.g., call with a recruiter, interview 1, interview 2, etc.). Additionally, you can look at the process through the lens of diversity: Is an organization hiring diverse talent, and if not, in which phase in the process is it losing diverse candidates?

Benefits of leveraging recruitment analytics in your organization

Recruitment analytics have become essential for HR teams. By using AI and people analytics tools, organizations can reduce hiring costs, enhance the quality of hires, and adapt better to market changes. Focusing on the right recruitment metrics helps leaders make data-driven decisions that support immediate recruitment goals and future organizational success.

When your company invests in recruiting the right talent, it makes sense to optimize this process. Understanding your HR metrics and how they impact the broader business is vital to any business’ success.

💡Ready to transform your hiring process into a valuable, insight-driven function? Download our Recruitment Dashboard for HR Leaders today or take our interactive product tour to learn more about how to gain actionable insights in minutes with Crunchr!