Thursday, September 13, 2007

Measuring Recruiting Effectiveness

No matter how you recruit – through Human Resources, referrals, or recruitment firms – measuring each source's effectiveness and efficiency is imperative if you want to streamline the process and save money (and who doesn't?). In the book, Investing in Your Company's Human Capital: Strategies to Avoid Spending Too Little – or Too Much (AMACOM, 2005), author Dr. Jack Phillips offers some strategies to carefully and proactively manage and measure your recruiting techniques.

"Monitoring recruitment sources enables HR to track candidates to the original person, place, ad, or Web site," says Phillips. "The recruiting source or channel can be connected to the hire ratio." When tracking a source, says the author, you also need to reflect carefully on the source's effectiveness. You can also use the hire ratio – the percentage of candidates flowing through a source divided by those being hired – to measure how well the source provides qualified candidates. It's also just as important to compare the turnover in the first year of employment by each recruiting source (called the churn rate), says Phillips.

Of course, quality, a more subjective measure, is equally important in measuring recruiting source effectiveness. Phillips suggests administering surveys 30 to 60 days after employment start date to assess quality.

Lastly, it's important to measure the efficiency – the time it takes to fill the job – of the source. To measure this, Phillips suggests beginning at the time the request for a new employee is submitted and continuing to the time when the candidate actually begins the job. "In organizations where job growth is necessary or there is high turnover, time to recruit is an important consideration," he says. "The faster the response, the better – as long as quality is there."

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