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How Recruitment Metrics & Dashboards Can Help Improve Hiring New Candidates

Recruitment metrics and dashboards by datapine

To compete, evolve, and remain relevant, today’s most forward-thinking businesses prioritize continually improving their internal processes while measuring their success with pinpoint accuracy – and hiring talent is no exception.

There may be many talented job-seekers out there, but connecting with the best possible candidates for any role in your organization can seem like an uphill struggle. Not only is it important to source the right people for your company, but it’s also essential for your new recruits to fit into your internal culture, remaining motivated, happy, and engaged at all times. That’s where recruitment KPIs come in.

By utilizing recruiting KPIs presented through the medium of visual and interactive HR dashboards, it’s possible to use recruitment KPI metrics to better interpret and evaluate a variety of staff acquisition factors that aid in hiring processes. If you embrace recruitment analytics with the aid of various HR KPIs, you’ll be able to develop new strategies that will have a positive impact on your organization from human resources, interdepartmental collaboration, and KPI management perspectives.

According to ManpowerGroup, around 72.8% of companies are experiencing difficulties when sourcing skilled candidates, and 45% of employers are concerned about finding people with the right skills for particular roles within the organization.

To give you a greater understanding of recruitment analysis and HR hiring metrics, we’re going to look at the benefits of using recruitment KPIs, explore the meaning of analytics in recruitment, glance at recruiting dashboards, showcase 33 key recruitment metrics examples, and provide you essential tips to create your own recruiting report practice.

Let’s get started.

What Is Recruitment Analytics?

Recruitment analytics is the process of using data-driven insights to ensure you are hiring top candidates for key roles in your business. Thanks to predictive analysis and real-time data, you’ll cut costs and identify factors that are influencing your hiring strategy.

Before we delve any deeper into the dynamics of different types of recruitment metrics and dashboards, it’s important to understand the meaning of recruitment analytics as well as its role in the commercial world.

When you are an organization looking to gain new employees, data analysis tools allow you to read data patterns that facilitate formulating information-driven strategies. In this case, you will need strategies to empower you to hire the most qualified candidates for the position.

In order to read these data and analyze patterns, human resources departments use online business intelligence to consolidate the data and work on it. Thanks to their data visualization capabilities, they can easily elaborate recruitment dashboards, which are tools that empower people to read and understand data patterns in a streamlined, comprehensive manner. You can use recruitment dashboards to input a variety of KPIs into the system, and you can evaluate various factors that will aid your hiring strategies.

Now, in a data-driven business world, you have to be able to leverage data so that you can stay on top of the competition, hire the right employees, make sure your managers are following the best contracting practices, and take steps to ensure that the employees are functioning within your organization to the very best of their abilities.

By leveraging the power of recruitment analysis to your advantage and working with an interactive dashboard software, you'll be able to streamline your hiring efforts in many key areas, including vacancy fill times, application reviews, talent screening and shortlisting, and recruiting value or accuracy – among many others.

Measuring, exploring, and analyzing recruitment analytics metrics that are relevant to your hiring goals over set timeframes will give you the power to refine your efforts over time, reducing inefficiencies while streamlining your processes while recruitment KPIs will give you the tools to set and measure specific hiring-based goals for your business, which will ultimately help your organization to source and retain the kind of staff that will propel it to prosperous new heights. Now that you know details about recruitment analytics, let's focus on recruitment KPIs and their basic definition.

"The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility to their employees will have the edge in this area." – Bill Gates

What Are Recruitment KPIs?

Recruitment KPIs are business insights that allow HR professionals to optimize the recruiting process, improve their performance, and enhance productivity. With the aid of in the moment insights, HR teams can make smart strategic decisions to reach their recruiting goals.

Such insights are critical in establishing a healthy HR process and, ultimately, bringing sustainable development to the company and its resources. We will now go into more detail about what you can learn from such indicators and what kind of assistance they can offer.

What You Can Learn From Recruitment Metrics

Before we get into the finer details and specific metric tools for your recruitment dashboards, it’s important to understand what you can learn from recruiting metrics. Start by considering the following points:

  • How long does it take to hire employees?
  • Is your potential candidate the right fit for the job?
  • How much money are you spending on the entire hiring process?
  • How efficient are you in the hiring process?
  • How many candidates are applying for your job postings?
  • Which places are the candidates looking for your job postings?
  • How well does your new employee perform on the job?
  • Does the job description you provided with the listing accurately represent the job details?
  • Is your recruitment journey engaging, transparent, and efficient?

With the help of these points, you can use HR recruitment metrics on your real-time dashboard and generate astonishing amounts of insights.

As you will slowly discover, there is some extremely valuable information that you can gain from using recruiting metrics. In an information-driven world, using the appropriate online data visualization tools to understand what lies behind these numbers and figures will allow you to play your cards right. Now that recruiting talented professionals propels your organization forward into success, you do not want to miss opportunities to better understand how to acquire the ideal candidates before your competition gets there first.

Now that you understand the fundamentals of recruitment analytics, let’s take a look at some recruitment dashboard examples. 

Your Chance: Want to create a modern recruitment dashboard for free?
We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from interactive HR dashboards!

What Are Recruitment Dashboards?

A recruitment dashboard is an analytical tool to track, monitor, and analyze every aspect of your hiring efforts. By working with a mix of KPIs, you can uncover trends and patterns that will ultimately optimize your hiring strategy, offering the best returns.

Recruitment dashboards are also designed to help you keep your existing staff engaged, motivated, and valued—something that is essential to ongoing commercial growth in today’s competitive digital age.

HR dashboards are increasingly popular and important in today’s human resources departments. They help visualize key information to manage the workforce in the best way possible and understand potential pain points to resolve them as soon as they are spotted. The smart use of recruitment analytics saves a lot of stress and money in helping managers make better-informed decisions or track employees’ performance.

Data is a very powerful tool for human resources during the hiring process when you leverage recruiting insights on your online dashboard. The days when you take an age to secure quality employees for your organization based upon limited information are now over.

As a data-driven organization, you can measure various factors that can help in the recruiting process, and to do that, you can use your recruitment dashboards to better read key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluate the effectiveness of your recruitment process.

In addition to using data to attract new recruits to your organization, HR managers can also use visual dashboards to manage their existing talent.

Let’s face it: you have to stay competitive in this constantly and swiftly adapting world of data and to do that, you have to source the best employees and use the most advanced HR analytics software available that can help give you the extra edge to boost the success rate of your business.

There is a wide variety of recruitment KPI examples that you can use on your dashboard to ease the recruitment process. These dynamic KPIs are highly visual and built to improve long-term strategic planning and real-time decision-making. Housing the right mix of these visualizations in a recruiting metrics dashboard will give you a panoramic overview of your entire strategy, helping you hone in on the parts that need improvement or have the power to take your hiring efforts to the next level.

Recruitment Metrics Dashboard Examples

Now that you’re up to speed with the recruitment analytics dashboard and analysis essentials, we will explore three real-world tools.

Each recruitment dashboard sample is equipped with a different mix of key performance indicators but is designed to streamline and improve key activities linked to hiring and retention.

1. Recruiting dashboard

First up, we have our recruiting dashboard. This balanced and visually striking tool exists to help stretched HR managers streamline recruiting timelines while driving greater financial efficiency across the board. 

A recruitment dashboard showing recruitment metrics such as the average cost of hiring by seniority level, recruiting funnel, turnover rates, etc.

**click to enlarge**

Armed with a melting pot of visuals that facilitate ‘on the spot’ decision-making, this recruitment KPI dashboard, generated with a professional dashboard builder, breaks down hiring costs based on organizational seniority and the hiring conversion rates of your HR team members.

Here, you can break down every key chunk of the recruitment funnel while exploring trends related to your time to fill certain positions as well as staff turnover according to age range. Working with these key insights will empower you to support your existing HR staff while taking targeted measures to streamline your hiring funnel and retain staff within age groups with the highest turnover—everything you need to succeed.

Primary KPIs:

  • Cost per Hire
  • Recruiting Conversion Rate
  • Time to Fill

2. Talent management dashboard

Next, we move on to our dynamic and engaging talent management dashboard. This slick analysis tool is equipped with the intelligence required to keep your staff happy, engaged, and motivated.

A recruiting dashboard example focused on talent management

**click to enlarge**

The visual tools contained here are designed to help you look after the people who make your organization tick in the ways that matter most, resulting in higher retention rates as well as a better brand reputation.

Here, you can interact with the recruiting KPIs that uncover trends based on dismissal rates, staff ratings based on specific attributes, key turnover rates, high-level hiring stats, and staff satisfaction rates. Making this recruitment dashboard template an essential part of your toolkit will ensure you show the best commitment to your employees, enjoying incredible returns.

Primary KPIs:

  • Talent Satisfaction
  • Talent Rating
  • Talent Turnover Rate
  • Dismissal Rate

3. Recruiting diversity dashboard

Ensuring diversity in the workplace is essential. No longer is it acceptable to see diversity as some added bonus—now, it should be a key part of your culture—as it should have always been. 

HR recruiting dashboard containing diversity metrics

**click to enlarge**

To track and manage your diversity practices while ensuring that your hiring activities are balanced, fair, and inclusive, working with the right data is important.

This decidedly vibrant recruiting metrics template features visual insights that offer a detailed snapshot of hiring trends based on gender, disability, and ethnicity.

Here, you can see how balanced your hiring efforts are while gaining a panoramic view of your organization’s overall diversity profile. If you feel you lack diversity and inclusion, this data-driven tool, generated with datapine's modern dashboard design software, will help you make the right tweaks and choices across the board.

Primary KPIs:

  • Gender Diversity by Role
  • Ethnicity Diversity
  • Turnover Rate By Group
  • Recruitment Breakdown By Ethnicity

Why You Need to Track Your Recruitment Funnel

It’s clear that recruitment online reporting tools and recruiting reporting metrics are a powerful force. But without accurately tracking your recruitment funnel, your efforts could be diluted and become less efficient in the long run.

As we established, finding the right people for your organization can prove to be a tricky process. That said, your recruitment funnel will help shape your strategies for successful talent acquisition in all departments – from customer services to marketing and beyond.

Although each recruitment funnel differs slightly from business to business, fundamentally, your recruitment funnel consists of the following:

  • Attracting passive candidates for a particular role.
  • Setting up the application processes and offering shortlisted interviews or assessments.
  • The interviews and assessments of your shortlisted active candidates.
  • Hiring or offering the role to the most suitable candidate.
  • Acceptance and onboarding.

By tracking each stage of the funnel with the help of a dynamic recruitment funnel dashboard, you’ll be able to streamline every stage of the process, keeping your candidates engaged throughout and ultimately sourcing the best possible person for the role. In turn, this will fuel organizational growth, ongoing development, and an increase in your bottom line.

Recruitment funnel with the average length of recruitment process and conversion rates of each HR professional

**click to enlarge**

This particular recruitment funnel template was created with a professional dashboard maker, and it offers a comprehensive insight into each stage of the hiring process, providing key data on elements – such as the length of particular stages or cycles of the operation – while delivering insights on the level of activity at each stage of the recruitment funnel.

This information is invaluable as it will help busy modern businesses continuously improve and enhance their overall hiring strategy, cementing sustainable success. And in today's digital age, constant improvement and evolution are vital – especially concerning talent acquisition.

Now that you know how to optimize your recruitment BI dashboards, let’s look at a mix of dynamic recruitment KPIs examples.

Your Chance: Want to create a modern recruitment dashboard for free?
We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from interactive HR dashboards!

Our Top 33 Recruitment Metrics & KPI Examples

Now that we’re up to speed with the power of recruitment metrics and understand what we can learn from how recruitment indicators let’s get under the skin of the recruitment metrics examples that will ensure your HR and recruitment initiatives are optimized for the level of sustainable success that will propel your organization to the next level. These 33 striking visualizations, generated with datapine's modern visual analytics software, will serve as a north star when you want to consistently make the right hiring decisions.

First, we will look at the recruiting KPIs you would typically find on a hiring dashboard. These essential insights are designed to reduce inefficiencies while streamlining the hiring process. Let’s start with recruitment & hiring performance indicators.

1. Offer acceptance rate (OAR)

Your OAR is one of the most important talent acquisition KPIs, demonstrating your ability to understand your candidates' preferences and priorities.

If your OAR is consistently high, it's a clear indication that your job specs are transparent, your hiring strategy is fluid, and you are taking measures to tailor your offers to meet candidate needs as well as expectations.

If your OAR doesn’t measure hiring success by analyzing trends and patterns, you can get straight to the root of the issue and take strategic action to improve your communications, job spec messaging, and overall candidate experience. As a result, you will attract consistently high-quality talent to your business while improving your recruitment retention rates across the board.

In summary, if every aspect of your candidate experience is cohesive and informative, you will make it easier for potential hires to get on board with your company culture, developing a sense of motivation and loyalty before the end of the process. In that sense, OAR is one of the most essential recruitment reporting metrics for any hiring or HR department.

2. Candidate experience

Much like net promoter score indicators, which are pivotal to keeping your existing staff happy, engaged, and motivated, NPS-style KPIs are also incredibly effective for the candidate experience.

In addition to OAR, candidate experience NPS metrics will empower you to drill down into specific areas of your recruitment strategy by understanding the overall satisfaction levels of your candidates.

Using a recruiting metrics template to quantify your candidate experience, NPS will offer the level of insight you need to optimize specific areas of your hiring journey – from initial application and first interviews to assessments, digital communications, and beyond.

To demonstrate the value of using NPS scores to benchmark your candidate experience initiatives, you can simply use this metric to gain at-a-glance access to the success of your satisfaction from a recruitment perspective.

To gather clean, reliable data for recruitment analytics metrics of this variety, you can also adjust this metric and ask your candidates to rate their overall experience from one to ten (to identify your percentage of Promoters, Passives, and Detractors) while asking for specific feedback.

This powerful mix of qualitative and quantitative data will paint a panoramic picture of your candidate engagement efforts across touchpoints, giving you the intelligence you need to continually adapt to the landscape around you.

3. Time to fill

The time to fill metric promotes stability within your organization. It measures how long it would take to locate and recruit a potential new employee. The process begins with a requisition being approved by a company and extends to the point when the candidate has completed the necessary background checks. It allows managers to understand how long it takes to fill a job position.

Time to fill, an HR KPI depicts the department and days needed to fill a position

This is important because hiring employees can often be time-consuming, involving multiple steps. The most successful organizations want to take measures that will considerably reduce their HR KPI ‘time to fill’ figure while keeping a good quality of hire to ensure the best possible outcome.

4. Quality of hire

This recruiting metric indicates whether the person appointed to fill the position is good or bad for your organization.

It is generally used to measure the performance of a new candidate during a one-year period. Low ratings can indicate bad hires, costing companies substantial money. Knowing exactly how your employees are helping your organization and what skill sets they’re bringing to their job is integral.

5. Source of hire

How do you know where to look when hiring the best people for your organization? Well, the smartest recruiters use the source of hire. Candidates are using lots of digital channels to research and find your company. So it only makes sense that the smartest recruiters use multiple channels, rather it’s LinkedIn, advertisements, or other social networks.

How do you know which of these channels is the most effective? You visualize the sources of hire on your recruitment digital dashboard. It indicates information such as

  • The number of applicants originating from each source.
  • Of all the applicants that came to the specific channel, how many were qualified?

With this operational KPI, you can better understand your recruiting expenditures and stop using channels that are not bringing in interested candidates, saving you some money. Likewise, you can spend more money on the channels that bring your organization the most interested, qualified people looking to be a part of your company.

6. Source of channel efficiency

Expanding on our previous point, source of channel efficiency is one of the recruiting metrics KPI that will help you evaluate the success and efficiency of your main candidate hire sources.

By identifying and analyzing your primary hiring sources, you can use the source efficiency metric to understand which sources convert the best-quality candidates and which ones need work.

Once you’ve gained an insight into candidate source quality, you can take definitive measures to place additional investment into the hiring channels that are performing well while optimizing the weaker touchpoints to improve your messaging and attract a wider range of talented candidates – all while driving down recruitment costs.

7. Sourcing channel costs

If your recruitment processes are disjointed, long-winded, and inefficient, your return on investment (ROI) will suffer significantly.

By gaining the ability to calculate and compare your recruitment costs per hiring channel (third-party job sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, recruitment services, etc.), you can make swift yet informed decisions concerning your activities or strategies surrounding each ongoing campaign.

For instance, you might find that your ad spending for Facebook is skyrocketing with little return on hiring investment. As such, you’ll be able to improve your communications or try halting paid advertising on that particular channel for a while. In essence, this savvy KPI will keep your recruitment strategies as economically efficient as possible.

8. Time to hire

Time to hire is a valuable recruitment metric, as it quantifies the number of days it takes between a candidate being approached for a specific role and when they actually accept the job. This KPI can sometimes be confused with the time to fill. The main difference between the two is that this metric starts when the candidate applies for a job, while this particular insight starts when the job requisition is approved. 

This information is useful because it will show you how efficient your recruitment processes are, giving you the depth of insight you need to streamline every stage of the funnel.

If you drive down your time to hire, you will improve the quality of your hires. If you take too long, it’s more likely that a potential candidate will get snapped up by a competitor.

9. Cost per hire

Understanding how much money you spend during recruitment can be a very efficient way to allocate spending. It’s important to look at all of your costs when hiring someone to learn where you can cut costs during the hiring process without affecting the candidate’s quality or experience level.

The cost per hire measures all the costs involved in the hiring process of one candidate

Here are some of the factors that the HR metric ‘cost per hire’ helps discover:

  • Recruitment time costs
  • Costs of managers and employees that are involved in the hiring process
  • Administrative costs that are linked to the process of training and implementing new employees

10. Internal and external recruiting costs 

Any major KPI, like the cost per hire, requires smaller metrics to provide deeper insights. The internal and external recruiting costs are a metric that breaks down specific costs of the recruiting process to help spot improvement opportunities and increase efficiency. Internal costs include salaries, commissions, technology, infrastructure, and more, and external costs can include staffing agencies, ads, events, and travel costs, among many others. 

Tracking each of these costs separately can help you find areas in which you might be overspending and relocate those resources to more important parts of the recruiting process. However, it is important to note that each application will have different requirements and costs; therefore, you need to look at costs individually each time. Hiring a new CEO can be way more expensive than hiring a new intern or junior employee.  Likewise, hiring a remote vs. on-premise employee also has different costs. 

11. Applicants per opening

This is a great indicator for measuring job popularity. But just because many people are applying for your job does not necessarily equate to something positive for your company. It could indicate that the job description is too vague, for example.

But this insight can also give you a great starting place to begin narrowing down your job description while still maintaining that suitable candidates are applying for this position, even if fewer people are applying for that particular job.

These valuable KPIs will help you understand human resources metrics and hiring practices. Tracking these insights frequently will give extra depth to your overall recruitment strategy, ensuring it always remains cohesive and productive.

12. Application completion rate 

Next in our recruitment metrics examples is the application completion rate. This particular insight will tell you how many potential applicants are dropping off or giving up on completing the process.

If your completion rate is consistently low, this will let you know that something within your application system is confusing, long-winded, or deemed irrelevant. You can pinpoint the issue and optimize your application system or processes using this KPI.

13. Hiring manager satisfaction

This is an interesting visual you should include because you want to understand how satisfied your managers are with employee performance. Again, you can measure this by using a net promoter score (NPS) approach:

The Net Promoter Score is a KPI measuring how satisfied managers are in relation to employee performance

This three-tiered numeric system will give you a clear gauge of whether your hiring managers are unsatisfied, satisfied, or particularly happy with a hire. It’s a visualization that will help you understand whether your talent acquisition efforts are working on the whole.

For example, if your managers are satisfied, it implies that the candidate fits well within the team, which indicates a successful hire.

14. Recruitment funnel effectiveness

Circling back to the recruitment funnel, this effective insight offers an incredibly focused means of analyzing the effectiveness of every stage of your hiring journey - insights that surpass the processes from the candidate’s perspective alone.

As the digital age continues to shift and change, so do the dynamics of the hiring process. With more touchpoints, tools, and candidate assessment methods available than ever, gaining a panoramic insight into every effort and initiative is essential. The recruitment tunnel effectiveness KPI will help you do just that.

One of the most useful insights served up by this recruiting metrics dashboard KPI is the yield ratio per step – a calculation based on the number of applicants that have successfully completed each stage of the funnel over the total number of applicants that entered the stage.

By understanding this metric, you’ll learn where you need to refine your efforts for maximum recruiting success.

15. Recruiting conversion rate

Conversions are essential to determining the overall success of your efforts in a wide range of business-related areas, such as marketing and sales. And again – recruitment is no exception.

A productivity metric to evaluate human resources: recruitment conversion rate

This particular part of a recruiting metrics dashboard is an essential HR performance indicator as it hones in on the performance of your internal human resources executives instead of solely focusing on potential employees.

By looking at both sides of the recruitment coin, you will gain a panoramic overview of your recruiters’ general performance. If you find that one of your talent recruiters’ acquisition rates has dwindled over time, you can get to the root of the issue, providing the training and mentorship to make a positive change. 

Last but certainly not least, these recruiting metrics are focused on keeping your staff motivated, content, and productive across the business.

16. Talent Satisfaction

In many ways, your talent is the backbone of your entire business. Without an engaged, motivated workforce, your productivity and progress will dwindle.

Talent satisfaction shown on a gauge chart

As one of our most powerful talent acquisition metrics, this employee-centric NPS-style KPI will empower you to create a culture that always satisfies your talent. By conducting frequent personnel satisfaction surveys and using this dynamic recruitment KPI to benchmark your business’s overall satisfaction levels, you can take direct strategic action to ensure your employees feel valued, engaged, and motivated in every key aspect of their working lives.

Your Chance: Want to create a modern recruitment dashboard for free?
We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from interactive HR dashboards!

17. Candidate job satisfaction

How much does the job description match with what a new candidate is experiencing in the workplace? This insight measures employees’ expectations of their job satisfaction and can determine a realistic job preview. This helps to put into perspective the experience your employees have with your organization.

This KPI recruitment dashboard metric is not only pivotal for understanding the quality of your candidate experience. This invaluable talent-centric data can also help you gain insights to apply to your ongoing talent satisfaction strategies.

18. Selection ratio

Another key feature of any modern recruitment metrics template is that the selection ratio KPI is based on your total number of hired candidates compared to your overall number of candidates over a certain timeframe.

This particular insight is worth measuring, as it provides an accurate idea of how many quality candidates you’re closing as part of your talent acquisition and recruitment processes. If you’re nurturing or interviewing a lot of candidates but not seeing many hires, you will be able to drill down into the issue and appraise the value of your communications, hiring tools, and assessment processes, making vital improvements in the process.

19. Employee turnover rate

As one of the most powerful metrics for recruiting, your employee turnover rate will give you a comprehensive insight into how your staff retention efforts are working.

Third recruitment metric: turnover rate to measure retention

Our employee turnover KPI is presented in a digestible bar chart format, offering a quick-glance insight into the percentage of voluntary versus involuntary turnover over a specific period. By tracking this talent acquisition dashboard metric regularly, you can create an effective talent replacement plan in the event your retention rates drop.

Through frequent monitoring, you can get to the root of staff turnover issues and make strategic decisions to encourage staff loyalty and drive turnover rates down.

20. First-year attrition

The insights featured here are great metrics and analytics in recruiting for measuring hiring success. First-year attrition can be broken down to be either managed or unmanaged, which means that the contract is either terminated by the employer or the person in question leaves the company.

Average time stay is an HR KPI that shows how long employees stay in a company

It could indicate that the job description did not meet the candidate's expectations or that the candidate did not fit well within the team.

21. Female-to-male ratio

Did you know? Gender diversity in the workplace is still a pressing issue. While we’ve come a long way in recent years, many sectors seriously lack female talent – and to their detriment.

A female to male ratio is a recruitment metric that is depicted on a 5-year basis

There are many benefits of having a fair, equal, gender-diverse workforce. If your workplace is imbalanced, this essential recruitment analytics KPI will help you make positive changes that will improve your business.

While this metric largely depends on candidate availability, utilizing it to your advantage lets you keep track of gender equality in your workplace and provide your recruitment staff with the information they need to attract a wider range of diverse talent. This recruitment-based KPI will bring your business a brighter, more prosperous future.

22. Candidate Diversity

Diversifying your talent is essential to creating a fair, equal, and balanced work environment that benefits from a broad mix of perspectives, experiences, and skills.

Working with a candidate diversity metric is the way forward to ensure you’re connecting with a wide range of amazing talent and ensure your organization doesn’t solely consist of like-minded clones. Utilizing KPIs like this will ensure you’re grabbing the attention of an excellent mix of candidates from a number of recruitment channels while engaging a wider mix of talent at every stage of the pipeline.

23. Time to productivity

The time to productivity KPI measures how long it takes for a new recruit to find their feet, gel with the company culture, and start to work in a valuable, consistent way.

Time to productivity focuses on the time between the official hire and the time when a new recruit starts to fulfill their role consistently. This time frame varies from industry to industry, and by setting yourself a feasible benchmark, you can decipher whether your onboarding or initial training initiatives need improvement.

If you reduce your time to productivity, you will reap the rewards of better internal cohesion, improved talent retention, and commercial growth.

24. Costs of getting to optimum productivity level (OPL) 

As an extension of the previous metric, the OPL tracks all costs associated with getting your new hire to the optimum productivity level. It goes beyond recruiting costs and tracks training expenses, mentorship programs, equipment, software, and more. It considers a broader picture of costs to help the business really understand how much it costs to hire and integrate a new employee into the company. 

Tracking the OPL closely and complementing it with other metrics on this list can help decision-makers optimize the onboarding and training processes to ensure high levels of employee retention and a positive return on investment from their talent acquisition efforts. 

25. Time to promotion

By drilling down into a time-to-promotion KPI, you can see exactly how many of your hires have progressed within the organization over a certain timeframe.

This is important because, by reducing your time to promotion rates, you will essentially be making your internal training and talent nurturing initiatives more impactful, boosting retention rates in the process. Keeping quality employees is vital to success in the digital age, and this KPI will be your North Star in making your retention and development strategy the best it can be.

26. Dismissal rate

Next, in our rundown of essential metrics for recruiting, we have the dismissal rate. Your employee turnaround rate is essential for assessing the value of your talent acquisition decisions and whether your new candidates fit with your company culture. 

The dismissal rate is a fundamental KPI to include in your recruitment dashboard

Dismissals are typically influenced by both the employer and employee, happening for a number of reasons, including contract termination, resignation, and personnel breaches. By making the dismissal rate a key fixture of your recruitment metrics template, you will be able to understand just how much talent loss you incur over a specific period and take targeted measures to drive down your turnover rates.

Here, it’s especially important to focus on retaining your junior talent, as these recruits will shape your organization's future.

Now that we have included the top metrics you need to have for creating a powerful HR analytical report, we will delve into the topic even deeper by looking at some best practices and tips for efficient recruitment reporting.

27. Gender diversity by role

Role level by gender as a part of datapine's list of recruitment KPIs examples

This particular metric offers an at-a-glance snapshot of your male-to-female share of positions throughout the organization. Based on managerial and non-managerial roles, this will help you set and reach gender equality targets sustainably. If you spot an imbalance or you’re below target, you can take immediate action to improve your strategy and your hiring outlook. This is an insight that you should monitor regularly, particularly if you’re in the middle of interviewing or onboarding for a variety of roles at the same time.

28. Ethnicity diversity by department

HR recruitment metric tracking the ethnicity and gender share by departments

Much like the recruitment analytics example above, this powerful visual insight breaks down ethnicity-based diversity according to specific departments. Again, you can interact with this insight to hold yourself accountable for making fair and inclusive hiring decisions across the whole organization. If you notice a significant imbalance, you will be able to address the situation by making targeted strategic and cultural tweaks, which will result in a fair, stronger, more inclusive workplace.

29. Turnover rate by group

Turnover rate by group as an example of recruiting KPIs

This telling recruitment dashboard template insight offers a solid panorama of staff who have actively left the organization of their own accord. Broken down into specific genders, ethnicity groups, and those with disabilities, here you can pinpoint where your turnover rates are the highest and address the issue. By gaining this level of intelligence, you can identify weak spots swiftly and formulate recruitment campaigns that result in more inclusive, more impactful hiring choices.

30. Recruiting funnel by ethnicity

HR recruitment metrics examples: recruiting funnel by ethnicity

Last but certainly not least, in our rundown of visuals, we have a recruitment funnel by ethnicity. This essential recruitment metrics template will tell you if any part of your recruitment funnel is narrow in scope or just plain biased. If you notice a strong lean towards a certain demographic or ethnic group, you can zoom into the specific parts of the funnel you believe to be the most biased and reconstruct your approach. Doing so will result in a culture, as well as a workplace, that demonstrates a true commitment to diversity while hiring the best possible candidates for various roles throughout the organization.

31. Application drop-off rate 

As its name suggests, the application drop-off rate tracks the percentage of candidates who start but don’t complete the selection process. There are many reasons why job applicants abandon the selection process. It can be anything from complicated tasks, processes that are too long, a lack of mobile optimization, a website crashing due to many applications, or just a loss of interest in the offer. 

Tracking this metric closely and understanding the reasons why it might increase can help you build strategies to make the selection process as efficient and engaging as possible. You can even ask some of the applicants for feedback after the process is completed to identify improvement opportunities. This will allow you to provide your potential employees with a good recruiting experience and ensure you are not missing out on top talent due to a bad application process. 

32. Time in process step

The time-to-process step is a metric that can be complemented with the application drop-off rate discussed above, as it provides more detailed insights into each step of the process. It basically tracks the time a candidate spends in each step, from the moment they apply for the opportunity and get contacted for it to the time it takes managers to do final interviews and any other step in between. It is a great indicator to track as it gives you a 360-degree view of the efficiency of your entire recruitment funnel. 

For instance, you might realize that after candidates have their first interview with the recruiter, it takes weeks for them to have the final interview with the manager. This bottleneck might delay the entire process, including the time the selected candidate will take to get used to the job and start being productive. Therefore, tracking it closely to ensure each stage is time efficient can significantly make a difference. 

A good tip in this regard is to set benchmark times to measure the development of each stage and identify bottlenecks more easily. 

33. Recruiting Marketing ROI

Last but not least, we have the recruiting marketing ROI. As its name suggests, it tracks the return on investment from all marketing activities related to the recruitment process. In other words, it measures the value generated compared to the human and monetary resources invested. For example, the number of qualified candidates per marketing channel, the costs of promotions, the time to fill, and software subscriptions are among many other metrics we mentioned in this list. 

Naturally, businesses want to generate the most value while spending the least amount of resources. Or the most value with the proper amount of resources, which is not always the case as costs and time resources can get out of control quickly. Tracking this KPI regularly will help you understand which channels are most effective in attracting and converting candidates so you can allocate resources smartly and maximize ROI. 

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13 Tips to Create Your First Recruitment Report

Many of the world’s leading brands across sectors are using recruiting reporting and recruitment reporting metrics to not only source but retain candidates that propel their business forward.

GAP, for instance, utilizes recruitment reports and KPIs to paint a panoramic picture of its current hiring processes to identify any weaknesses while capitalizing on its existing strengths. The forward-thinking brand also uses a recruitment metrics report to benchmark its talent-hiring success while tailoring its recruitment journey to better suit the needs of today’s digitally native job seekers.

A recruiting metrics dashboard is a powerful tool for online data analysis. If designed correctly, your recruiting metrics dashboard will help accelerate your company’s hiring efforts almost immediately.

To steer you towards recruitment reporting success and squeeze every last drop of value from your activities, here are five essential steps to consider:

1. Collect and curate your data

Before you start to physically compile your first recruitment report, it’s vital to collect all of the data that you believe is relevant to your efforts, strategies, and initiatives. Once you’ve identified your potential data sources, you should examine each insight and omit any information that you deem to be surplus to what’s required. Your ‘cleaned’ and curated data will form the foundations of your HR analytics report.

2. Prioritize data quality

When you’re developing your recruiter dashboard for data-driven success, it’s important to consider informational quality over quantity.

You can consolidate insights from a range of relevant sources, but without stripping away any data that is redundant, misleading, or fails to align with your specific hiring goals, it’s unlikely to offer any real value. To ensure that you work only with the insights that count, you should work as a team to examine your sources in greater detail and proceed with those that serve up the most impactful insights.

Once you’ve examined your sources and whittled them down, you can start thinking about the remaining data and which specific information segments will help you reach or even exceed your targets. To achieve this, implementing a data quality management system is always a great practice.

3.  Set your primary recruitment aims

Once you’ve cleaned and curated your data, you will have the direction you need to define your primary (or broader) recruitment aims and goals.

While “improving your recruitment efforts” is undoubtedly your main aim, it’s important to consider what your business needs to do to make it happen from a hiring and recruitment perspective.

For inspiration, your primary recruitment aims, or pillars, might be:

  • We want to improve our digital job board advertisements' return on investment (ROI).
  • We want to make the candidate experience better from a digital perspective.
  • We want to reduce staff turnover by engaging existing employees and hiring better, more relevant candidates for our vacancies.
  • We want to reduce our annual recruitment spend by a specific percentage.

These examples give you an idea of broader recruitment strategy aims. Once you know what you’re aiming for, you can refine these goals by taking the next step in the process.

4. Select the right KPIs

Remember – setting the right goals and targets is essential to recruiting analysis success. Once you’ve taken measures to curate your relevant data and set measurable hiring goals in a collaborative environment, you can use your KPIs to drill down further into your aims.

Armed with your primary aims and goals, you will be able to choose the right KPIs to help you track, measure, and monitor your efforts with pinpoint accuracy throughout the entire hiring journey and recruitment funnel. Doing so will ensure your business dashboards are optimized for success, covering every key aspect of your hiring and recruitment strategy.

For inspiration, check our guide on our most relevant HR-based KPIs and how to implement them into a comprehensive HR report.

5. Set a reporting schedule

Just like in any other business reporting process, it is important to define a time frame to generate reports and track specific metrics. Some metrics might need to be tracked in real-time, while others might need to be evaluated on a yearly basis. Therefore, thinking about a schedule beforehand can help make the process way more efficient and focused. 

Tracking everything at once can become easily confusing and prone to error. For example, you might be analyzing metrics like the application drop-off rate or the recruiting conversion rate to understand the success of your recruitment process. If you mix these indicators with first-year attrition, for example, you could be considering elements irrelevant to your analysis. Therefore, implementing a well-thought-out schedule is a valuable tip. 

6. Consider your audience

Before you create your recruitment report in full, take a moment to consider who will need to use or extract information from it. Will it be aimed at a particular campaign or department? Will you be presenting your data to senior executives? Will internal parties need to gain access to your reports? Take the time to answer these questions. For inspiration on how to communicate your information to others within your organization, explore our guide to selecting the right types of charts and graphs.

7. Tell a story

Data storytelling is a powerful tool, mainly because, as humans, we process narratives far better than any other form of information. When it comes to hiring talent, using your recruitment KPI template as a storytelling vessel will help you create an accurate profile of the kind of talent you're attracting and how successful your hires are in terms of value or longevity. 

By arranging your recruitment analytics in a way that follows a logical format (and tells a tale), you will be able to see where you need to improve and what you need to achieve your goals. If you find, for instance, that you’re interviewing a consistent flow of candidates that fit your job spec, but your retention rates are dropping through the floor, you might find that your new hires don’t fit in with your company culture. Through data storytelling, discovering a trend like this will be abundantly clear.

8. Make sure your design is balanced

Recruitment is a fast-paced field requiring much fluidity coupled with razor-sharp decision-making.

When you’re creating a recruitment report, it’s important to ensure your design is balanced. First of all, you should always remember that less is more and that space between information or visualizations is necessary. You should also design your dashboard to easily extract insights rather than prioritize aesthetics. Plus, you can generate white label dashboards to impress executives with a more professional look.

Let’s say you’re a busy hiring manager and hiring for a role that has historically seen a great deal of candidate churn. By having a recruitment dashboard equipped with the best recruiting metrics and logical and easy to digest at a glance, you can make quick, confident decisions concerning your talent acquisition processes.

A vacant slot can cost an organization untold amounts of resources, so when it comes to recruitment metrics analysis, accuracy, speed, and clarity are vital. A solid design will ensure that this is the case.

To ensure your recruitment metrics and analytics processes are razor-sharp, check out our essential guide to dashboard design principles.

9. Use interactive dashboards

Armed with your information and neatly curated data, you should work with an interactive dashboard to create a report that will get real results. The best interactive dashboards are intuitive, easy to navigate, completely customizable, and present all of the insights you need in one central location. If you’ve completed steps one to three, selected the right KPI dashboard software, and taken the time to get comfortable with it, compiling your report will be easy, and everything will fall neatly into place. The best thing is – if you need to make tweaks or changes, you’ll be able to do so at your leisure.

Their user-friendly nature makes interactive dashboards valuable in a business context. They offer a highly engaging and visually appealing snapshot of invaluable data that can be manipulated and explored upon need. This is a great value for non-technical users as insights can be easily extracted without the need to write code or work with massive databases. 

10. Drill down into platform features

Once you’re up and running with your interactive recruitment KPI template, you should aim to get to grips with the key drill down features available at your fingertips.

The best analysis tools will allow you to drill down deep into specific pockets of information while filtering out any insights irrelevant to the task or issue at hand, saving time in the process. Carving out time to learn these features in detail will give you the power to squeeze every last drop of value from your data-driven efforts.

Another key consideration to make when working with recruitment KPIs examples and platforms is giving the right access to the right people within your organization. Doing so will ensure that everyone has access to a level of data that will allow them to perform to the best of their abilities, 24/7.

11. Use automation tools

Gathering data, picking up metrics, and, finally, generating a report is a tedious task that is often subjected to manual error. Plus, it takes hours or even days to complete, taking valuable time that could be used in extracting insights and defining strategies. Luckily, software developers have realized this issue and have developed various automation tools to help businesses automate several processes, including reporting. 

We recommend you invest in recruiting analytics software that offers automation features from data collection to report generation and sharing. Tools like datapine allow users to connect their data sources and automate every stage of the reporting process. The best part is that the data contained in the reports also automatically updates, so you will always have fresh insights to work with. Using automation in your recruitment analytics journey will not only prevent any manual errors but also give you the time you need to focus on offering the best application experience and finding the best talent out there. 

12. Use intelligent alerts 

As you learned from the two previous points, there are a range of tools out there that make the lives of HR professionals a lot easier. While automation takes the pain of manual reporting out of your back, interactive filters allow you to explore the data and find valuable insights. But how often should you be checking the report? Well, the answer to that might depend on the urgency of the outcomes. During an application process, you might find yourself checking your report every couple of minutes to see if something new has emerged. This can become as time-consuming and nerve-wracking as it sounds. 

That is why our next tip is to rely on intelligent alerts. These solutions will notify you anytime a specific goal is reached or an anomaly is detected, so you don’t need to check your reports every ten minutes. All you need to do is set predefined values, and the alerts will go off if anything needs your attention. Using all these solutions with a professional data analyzer can take your reporting and analytics process to the next level. 

13. Never stop evolving

At this point, you’ll no doubt realize that you have a wealth of effective metrics for recruitment at your disposal. 

Now, one of the most important recruitment metrics best practices you’ll ever learn is to keep on evolving your efforts. We live in a fast-paced digital age where candidates' values, ideas, and skills are in a state of constant flux. Internally, you’re also likely to find that the roles within your organization continue to change or develop with the landscape around you.

That said, once your recruiting metrics dashboard template is firmly in place, you should carve out time to periodically access your KPIs and design to ensure you’re getting access to the most relevant metrics or visualizations. By making continual tweaks, you will ensure that your recruiter performance metrics are always optimized for success and ensure that your recruitment processes are the best they can be.

“Without the right succession planning put to play in human resources, we build for the future without a future.” – Mmanti Umoh

Your Chance: Want to create a modern recruitment dashboard for free?
We offer a 14-day free trial. Benefit from interactive HR dashboards!

Summary & Next Steps

Here is a summary of all the recruitment metrics we have discussed:

  1. Offer acceptance rate
  2. Candidate experience
  3. Time to fill
  4. Quality of hire
  5. Source of hire
  6. Source of channel efficiency
  7. Sourcing channel costs
  8. Time to hire
  9. Cost per hire
  10. Internal and external recruiting costs 
  11. Applicants per opening
  12. Application completion rate
  13. Hiring manager satisfaction
  14. Recruitment funnel effectiveness
  15. Recruiting conversion rate
  16. Talent Satisfaction
  17. Candidate job satisfaction
  18. Selection Ratio
  19. Employee turnover rate
  20. First-year attrition
  21. Female-to-male ratio
  22. Candidates diversity
  23. Time to productivity
  24. Costs of getting to the optimum productivity level 
  25. Time to promotion
  26. Dismissal rate
  27. Gender diversity by role
  28.  Ethnicity diversity
  29. Turnover rate by group
  30. Recruiting funnel by ethnicity
  31. Application drop-off rate
  32. Time in process step
  33. Recruitment marketing ROI

Data and analytics tools are evolving at a rapid pace. Technology and data are changing the way businesses develop strategies that impact their success, particularly when it comes to hiring and keeping talent. These tactics extend to recruitment strategies that are formulated around this constantly adapting world of data. To create the kind of intelligent, reliable strategies that are impacting the future of businesses, HR departments and managers are turning to recruiting KPIs.

“If you think hiring professionals is expensive, try hiring amateurs.” – Anonymous

We live in the age of information. Now that it’s possible to utilize recruitment analytics by embracing the power of dynamic recruitment KPI dashboards, you can effectively hire new employees, measure employee satisfaction, allocate hiring costs with intelligence, and understand your candidates’ application motivations.

To squeeze every last drop of value from your KPIs, you need real-time recruitment dashboards that will improve your recruitment-based business intelligence solutions and, ultimately, push you ahead of the pack. 

By adopting a mindset that understands the vital role of data in hiring and retaining employees, you will ultimately connect with the tools and methods that will make your organization as strong, inclusive, and adaptable as it can be, now and long into the future. Now is the time to strike.

Now that you understand the power of metrics and analytics in recruiting,  it's time to try datapine’s free trial and take that first big step toward business intelligence enlightenment.