Something VPs of Talent Acquisition often think about, but perhaps don’t have the most reliable data on, is their Recruiting Spend Management. That is, “our company spends X on recruiting in the following ways, with Y measurable results.”
What kinds of metrics can Talent Acquisition leaders be measuring?
Source of hire seems to be one of the more obvious, and not just as a talking point, but as a cost measurement tool. Most recruiting leaders have a good idea of their source of hire as a measurement of total hires, every ATS reports on this. By simply taking this information, and pairing it against data from your HRIS or talent management software on employee tenure, you start to get a much better picture of the overall effectiveness of your spend.
It’s great if you can say that employee referrals account for 30% of all hires, and are the cheapest source of hire (perhaps $1000 on average vs. the more standard $3000 per hire from non-referral sources). But if employee referrals have the highest turnover of all sources, then how effective is your spend management really? If you make 15% of your hires through agency recruiters, but those hires stick around longer and are more productive, perhaps you consider upping your spend on the agency side.
Research firms like CareerXroads collect this data in aggregate and publish reports on it, which can be useful as a means of comparison against industry trends.
By doing this simple process of diving into the recruiting spend management within your own organization, you can open up insights and optimizations you perhaps never knew existed.