When trying to understand'how different departments or functions of a business are performing, many organisations typically use metrics.

Whilst most businesses apply these measures to understand their productivity or sales, many are missing a trick by not applying these same metrics to their recruitment process. The most successful UK companies realise that staff are their most important asset and therefore, getting their recruitment strategy right should rank in equal importance as building their brand. As well as having a negative impact on a company's morale, hiring a 'dud' could potentially cost your business thousands in lost time, onboarding and re-recruitment. Constant refinement of your recruitment process will deliver a greater level of success into your organisation and we recommend utilising these 3 well established key metrics to improve your recruitment performance moving forward. 1) Recruitment Process: Submittal efficiency This is a measure of how well the candidates that have been sent over match the job profile. The metric is a simple calculation of dividing the number of interviewed applicants by the number of candidates CVs that have been shortlisted for the role. You would expect that this figure would be high, but not so high that you are not pushing the candidate specifications and looking at CVs that may be able to offer some slightly different skills to the job spec. Equally, if the figure is too low, this indicates that the job spec was probably inadequate in the first place, or perhaps the hiring manager is being over-selective with their CV criteria? If your recruitment'process is efficient, then you should be looking at interviewing three of every four CVs that are shortlisted for the position, giving you a 75% efficiency rating. If less than one of two are making it to interviews (50% efficiency), you may need to look at how much time is being lost on this part of the recruitment process.

2) Recruitment Process:'Interview efficiency

Interview efficiency is a great measure of your hiring manager's screening process. By dividing the number of candidates who have been offered the position by the number of interviewed applicants you will get a great indicator into how well your hiring manager is performing. Obviously it is role dependent, but ideally you should be looking at an efficiency rate of 30%, which means that job offers would be made to one of every three to four of the interviewed candidates. Alarm bells should start ringing if you see this efficiency drop to anything around 16% with only one in every six people interviewed offered a position with the company. Low efficiencies could bring to light a number of problems. Again, it could be that you're hiring manager is being overly selective and needs some guidance from recruitment specialists such as ourselves who will give them recruitment guidance on scheduling interviews, prepping candidates and getting interview feedback. If you need any advice, please don't hesitate to join us and pop a question in our Linkedin page, Response - Knowledge Network

3) Recruitment Process:'Offer efficiency

The final efficiency metric is based on the number of candidates who accept the job proposal and actual commence the position. For this metric, divide the number of candidates who accept your offer by the total number of job proposals you have sent out. To be efficient in this metric, you would expect the ratio to be around 80%, with four of five offers accepted. However, if the acceptance level is less than three in five offers (60%), then your recruitment process will need to be reviewed. A low offer acceptance rate could mean that the hiring manager isn't negotiating the the salary package efficiently with a candidate or didn't communicate the salary bracket at the beginning of the recruitment process. Although you may feel a 100% acceptance rate is a fantastic return, think again. It could be that you are offering a package for a job which may blow your competition out of the water, but are you actually paying over the odds for candidates you could get for a lot less? Thanks for reading and should you require any further help with your recruitment process, or if you are looking to recruit, you can get in touch with me here, or you can join the LinkedIn Response Knowledge Network here. 'Otherwise feel free to get in touch with me personally, via Twitter or LinkedIn using the links below.