Today’s job market seems to be getting tighter every day – especially in competitive fields like technology, engineering and finance. According to the Department of Labor, unemployment rates are at a historic low ranging as low as 3.9 percent. Stats also show that American workers are switching jobs at some of the highest rates in 17 years.
While recruiting top talent becomes a key objective to your business success, you need to take every step possible to ensure your recruiting initiatives produce results that help you reach your goals. If you already use an applicant tracking system, you are one step ahead of those who aren’t! Applicant tracking systems (also referred to as an ATS) offer a variety of benefits to organizations that are serious about stepping up their recruiting machines, such as:
- Streamlining and automating the recruiting process
- Creating a database of job candidates
- Reducing time to hire
- Increasing quality of new hires
As you master the art of using an ATS to improve your recruiting efforts, it’s important to ensure that you are using your tool to its full potential. There are many metrics that you can glean from your data that take recruiting to a level of precision that can change your success rate dramatically.
If you are not paying attention to these 5 metrics from your ATS, you should be:
1. Applicant Source Data – Understanding what sources are providing you with the highest number and best quality candidates is extremely beneficial to your recruiting efforts. By tapping into these easy-to-capture data points, you’ll gain insight into where to invest your budget dollars and where to expend resources.
2. Time-to-fill KPI – Even the best hiring process may break at some point. This break in the process can result in a lack of productivity, damage to the morale of your current employees as well as creating a negative impact on customer service efforts or your brand’s reputation. Your ATS software can help you pinpoint when your process doesn’t work as intended, and will help you understand where the system is impeded. Ultimately, this metric will help you tighten things up to accomplish your goals faster and better.
3. First-year Quality – Recruiting doesn’t end the day onboarding begins. In fact, you should be looking at the success rate of your recruits as a key metric for how well your efforts are working. Your applicant tracking system will help you measure what’s known as your “first-year quality.” While it might seem self-explanatory, first-year quality–also referred to as quality of hire–has a unique formula. By taking the percentage of candidates submitted by recruiters who are accepted for employment plus the percentage of candidates that do not leave, divided by two, you can drill down on a metric that will give insight into the effectiveness of the recruiting team in identifying quality, loyal talent. This KPI illustrates how well you are bringing in quality versus quantity.
4. Offer Acceptance Rate – Your applicant tracking system can also help you understand your submittal to business acceptance percentage (SBA) metric. SBA is defined as the percentage of candidates submitted by your company’s recruiting team that result in a hiring activity. This KPI is a measure of how well your recruiting efforts are working. Sourcing and screening candidates drain a huge portion of your resources and budgets. A low SBA is an indicator that your recruiting efforts are not working well.
5. Candidate Satisfaction Levels – Reputation matters in the arena of recruiting more than ever. In today’s competitive job markets, candidates are searching for companies with stellar reputations that reflect a positive working environment. Your ATS can help you perform quick surveys with candidates (both those that received offers and those who did not) to gain key insights into their experience dealing with your recruiting team, similar to a customer-facing net promoter score. In a powerful example of why this matters, Virgin Media in 2014 realized that 18 percent of its rejected applicants were customers. An unprofessional process caused approximately six percent of them to switch to a competitor. Check your applicant pool in your ATS against your customer pool in your CRM, overlapping entries may mean you’re doing something right with candidates, and you may want to survey these candidates to find out what attracted them so you can enhance and repeat.
Implementing an applicant tracking system to help you win at the recruiting game is the first step to taking things to the next level. The next, and even more important step, is to define how to use your data to measure, pivot and, ultimately, improve the ROI of your recruiting machine.