Time-to-Fill: No Longer the Gold Standard in Recruiting Metrics

Let’s face it: Recruiters have suffered from a lack of trustworthy metrics for decades.

To make up for it, you’ve relied on whatever data you can get your hands on—including the golden child, time-to-fill. While this certainly tells you if you’re dedicating your efforts wisely, the reality is this: time-to-fill is reactive and impacted by a variety of other factors.

So what else should recruiters track? Here are the big three: candidate engagement, campaign performance, and candidate quality. With data from AI-powered candidate experience platforms (like Phenom People), you can gain valuable insight into the entire talent journey, identify if your efforts are actually working, and finally abandon those tedious Excel spreadsheets.

The Triple Threat

Before you jump ahead and dig into the data, it all starts with thinking about metrics in a new way, and how you can use them to put together stronger, more effective strategies. With a platform that measures the performance of your career site, traffic sources, and candidate fit, you get actionable insights to take back to your CHRO and hiring managers and optimize your strategy.

1. Career Site Engagement

At the end of the day, the number one goal of your career site is to attract the right talent to your organization. To identify whether or not your site is effective, regularly review engagement metrics such as:

• Exit and bounce rate

• Time on site/individual pages

• Pages viewed

• New and returning traffic

For example, if visitors are spending a lot of time on your “Benefits” page, but not on your “About Us” page, that tells you candidates are more interested in what perks your company provides. Consider making “Benefits” more prominent or easy to access on your homepage, and identify ways to update the landing page itself so it’s more engaging and delivers plenty of helpful information.

For pages that aren’t getting a lot of engagement or have high bounce rates, it may not be worth spending a significant amount of effort into adding content you think is important. If it's not relevant to visitors, it's not a good use of your sacred time.

2. Traffic Sources

Posting on job boards often feels as though you’re throwing darts (or precious budget dollars) into the dark. If you advertise on LinkedIn and Indeed, what happens to your applications? Now’s the time to start considering the outcomes of every action you take. A platform that provides data into where your candidates are coming from helps shed light on what boards are and aren’t working—which paints a pretty clear picture as to where you should focus effort and spend.

Let’s say LinkedIn and Indeed are driving the highest volume of candidates to your career site, but Glassdoor is outperforming them both when you compare applicant conversion rates. Immediately, the questions begin to pop up. Why are candidates converting more on Glassdoor? Is it because your CEO rating is really high? Should you spend less on LinkedIn and Indeed if they’re not sending quality candidates? It’s time to get more curious about the data you’re looking at, and why the numbers are the way they are.

3. Candidate Fit Score

At the end of the day, you want to get a sense of candidate quality. Are your efforts actually leading to the right employees for your organization?

In a perfect world, we’d be able to easily track information post-hire—like the candidate’s performance rating, bonus eligibility, and pay increase—and tie it back to your recruiting efforts. But how can you track something that’s so objective? Some recruiting platforms powered by AI offer candidate fit scoring to help recruiters easily identify whether or not a candidate is a good match (based on criteria such as skills, interests, and geographic location). Take that metric and marry it with something on the back-end that tracks year-end performance.

Re-Thinking Your Recruiting Data

While these are only a few key ways to think differently about the metrics you track, remember this: the only way to begin seeing a real impact is by taking that first step. Focus on measuring one area above, and commit to identifying actionable takeaways to enhance your strategies and processes. Only then will you truly be able to measure and grow.