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In an age of fierce competition and constant transmogrification of business models, the single most important resource that drives value for any organisation is talent. Having said that, talent management has become a natural imperative for most, if not all organisations in the market today. In light of this fact, every Human Resource function is open to scrutiny in terms of value, cost and efficiency.
One of the first and probably one of the more visible processes that one encounters in Human Resource Management would be recruitment. This is primarily because of two reasons a) this function demands a high frequency of physical touch-points between HR, Business and the external market and b) it directly affects business efficiencies in areas that are headcount dependant.
In order to better discuss the topic at hand, it would be prudent to break recruitment activities into its basic distinguishable constituents/stages, viz. Sourcing, Screening, Selection, Fitment and On-boarding.
Recruitment Process Effectiveness metrics differ from stage to stage and must hence be discussed and understood in the light of each sub-process.
Sourcing:
Most organisations utilize external vendors for sourcing resumes of prospective candidates. In this process, efficiencies are achieved by using Conversion Ratios typically sorted vendor wise. These ratios indicate the percentage of selected resumes vis-à-vis rejected ones thus indicating the understanding of the role by the vendor and bandwidth in terms of market reach. A few other commonly used metrics to ensure Sourcing efficiencies include Conversion Time per vendor, Function-wise efficiencies per vendor and so on.
Conversion Ratio (Volume of Resumes)
(Vendor Specific) |
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No. of resumes shortlisted %
No. of resumes sourced by vendor |
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Conversion Time (in days)
(Vendor Specific) |
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Date of Shortlist – Date of Request
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Note - If variances are calculated, standards are set based on volume of hires per month/quarter
Screening:
Screening being a mostly HR-centric activity, most metrics revolve around effectiveness of recruitment team members. The most frequently used metric in this regard would be Time-to-Volume ratios per recruiter. This ratio captures indices that measure volumes of resume’s processed by a recruiter and the time taken to screen suitable resumes.
Volume Processed Ratio (per day)…VPR
(Recruiter Specific) |
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No. of resumes processed %
No. of resumes sourced by vendor |
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Processing Time (in days)…PT
(Recruiter Specific) |
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Date of Shortlist – Date of Sourcing entry
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Selection:
Unlike other solely time driven activities, selection involves a fair deal of relationship management. Hence, most metrics revolve around feedback capturing mechanisms to identify experiential nodes at various selection touch-points, e.g. the candidate’s overall experience in terms of treatment on company premises, the hiring manager’s experience in terms of effective scheduling of interviews and managing the selection process smoothly, etc. Time driven activities like timely scheduling of interviews would be the most commonly used quantitative metric in this case.
Fitment:
This activity involves two HR sub-functions, viz. recruitment and compensation teams. Each team however uses different metrics for evaluating effectiveness. Compensation teams are evaluated based on timely closure of fitments for offer preparation and conversion ratios (acceptance of offers vis-à-vis total offers made in a specified time-frame). Recruitment teams are evaluated on Selection-to-Offer time ensuring minimum time is spent. This metric essentially assumes that any candidate would have multiple offers in hand and delays in the offer process would lead to a pre-joining attrition.
Fitment Closure Time
(Vendor Specific) |
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Date of Offer – Date of Selection
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Conversion Ratio (%)
(Vendor Specific) |
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No. of offers accepted %
No. of offers made
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Note – Conversion ratios are calculated in a period (month/quarter – depending on frequency of hires). Standards are relaxed for higher level hires.
On-boarding:
This activity, although carried out by recruitment teams in most organisations, yet does not directly affect recruitment effectiveness. However, the overall experience of the new entrant is considered a good metric for evaluation.
In a growing economy, where talent sourcing is fast becoming a driving force behind business survival, recruitment plays a pivotal role in ensuring a steady flow of talent into an organisation. Attrition costs are rising as '2-year' and '3-year itches' are fast shrinking to '1 year itches'. Such circumstances demand a robust recruitment system to replace lost employees and ensure business continuity with minimal expenditure on training and orientation. Some of the above-mentioned metrics ensure a healthy recruitment system and act as control points to tweak as and when hiring shifts gears…as “Lack of vigilance is half the battle lost”!
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