The top 5 hiring metrics that you should be tracking in 2024

Uncover the five best hiring metrics to measure in 2024, and start improving your tech talent acquisition process today.

With around 12.7 million employed Brits actively job-hunting every day, to stand a chance next to your competitors, you need to perfect your hiring strategy to ensure every candidate’s experience is as seamless as possible.

Luckily, hiring metrics can help you do just that.

Read on to discover five examples which will help you perfect your talent acquisition process and improve your quality of hire.

What are hiring metrics?

Hiring metrics, otherwise known as “talent acquisition metrics “, provide any hiring process with an essential element that helps improve recruitment practices for the company, employees and candidates.

From analysing the success of your company’s hiring process to ensuring the acquisition of top candidates gets maximised, hiring metrics can help your company optimise its entire recruitment process.

Top 5 hiring metrics

Here are the top five hiring metrics to master that can boost your recruitment in 2024:

Time to fill

First of all, this talent acquisition metric merely measures the length of time it takes you to fill vacant positions in your company.

We measure time to fill from when your first potential candidate is identified to when a candidate has officially filled the vacancy and been hired.

But the time to fill metric also informs you of a few other things, including how much time your hiring managers dedicate to each vacancy and how long you’re making a candidate wait before informing them of your decision.

Improving and reducing your time to hire metric has multiple benefits, including:

• Fewer resources are wasted
• Improved productivity of hiring managers
• Lower chances of top candidates losing interest in your role
• Less pressure on existing employees who would benefit from the vacancy being filled

The average time to fill a vacancy in the UK in 2024 is around 28 days. Any longer and you will spend too much time filling each role which means you’re less likely to attract the best candidates.

How to reduce your time to fill

If you want to improve this metric and increase your chances of remaining competitive in today’s market, consider making the following changes:

1. Implement an employee referral strategy

Employee referral schemes are a great way to minimise time and resources for candidate identification.

This scheme enables existing employees to put forward candidates they know personally, meaning your hiring managers spend less time looking for candidates who fit the bill.

If you want to maximise the benefits of an employee referral scheme, try to incentivise and reward your employees with bonuses or benefits for each successfully referred hire.

2. Automate interview scheduling and follow-up communications

If you want to keep candidates interested, you’ll need to be hot on communication. Remember, the very best candidates are likely to have multiple options on the line, so may lose interest if they don’t hear from your company.

To ensure you maintain communication with candidates and progress them to interview promptly, consider automating the process. This way, your hiring team can dedicate more time to the hiring steps that require human interactions.

3. Analyse each step of the process

Analyse every stage of your hiring process to understand what process takes the most time.

You might find that some steps can’t be simplified or shortened while others could get streamlined dramatically.

Taking a meticulous approach like this enables you to maintain the quality of your acquisition process without changing every aspect.

Quality of hire

This second metric measures the quality of the candidate you end up hiring and their suitability to your organisation.

The quality of hire metric encompasses multiple elements, including employee performance, the candidate’s adaptability to the working environment, team and manager satisfaction, and individual career progression within the organisation.

If your company doesn’t emphasise the quality of its successful candidates, it becomes increasingly likely that your talent retention will decrease. Therefore, your overall efforts spent on the hiring process increase simultaneously.

Benefits of improving your quality of hire metric include:

• Increased employee satisfaction
• Increased manager satisfaction
• Reduction of time wasted spent on employee replacement
• Increased retention of top candidates
• Increased likelihood of achieving your organisation’s goals

More companies than ever are strengthening their focus on quality of hire and becoming more rigorous with their hiring process. Experiencing these benefits and remaining competitive in the job market means ensuring every new hire reaches your standards.

How to improve your quality of hire

Although quality of hire is hard to quantify, and improving it isn’t an exact science, there are a few things you can do initially to strengthen the metric:

1. Invest in interview training

It’s often at the interview stage where it becomes clear whether a candidate is right for your role, and vice versa. However, if your interviewers don’t know what to look for in a candidate or how to sell your company, then the wrong candidates might just slip through the net.

To avoid this, invest time and money into training your interviewers to help your hiring team conduct consistently high-quality interviews that appeal to the top candidates and reduce the possibility of hiring unsuitable talent.

2. Add assessments to your hiring process

Making sure the candidates you’re considering are well-suited to your role can rely on integrating a range of small assessments into your talent acquisition process.

As well as requesting candidates to complete skills assessments to demonstrate their experience and suitability for the role, consider holding personality assessments and quizzes to help discover which candidates would fit into your working environment.

3. Collaborate with employees

Consider running an employee audit to help determine how your hiring process comes across to top candidates.

Gain insights from your top employees to gather intel on what attracted them to your organisation and hone in on those strengths in your hiring process. Equally, take on board any constructive criticism they have and consider making changes. After all, nobody understands your brand like your employees.

Cost per hire

As you can probably guess, this third metric measures how much it costs to find, hire and onboard a candidate.

We determine cost per hire by adding up the various expenses incurred by your talent acquisition process, including agency fees, sourcing costs, travel expenses, interview training, and more.

You can calculate your cost per hire by finding the total cost of your hiring process over a given period and dividing it by the number of new hires along the way.

Here are a few benefits that come with reducing your cost per hire:

• A lower cost per hire means less time spent on the hiring process
• More money saved and more to spend on employee salaries and benefits
• A lower cost per hire enables you to onboard more quality candidates

The time to fill and cost per hire metrics are closely related, and – in general – the shorter your time to fill is, the lower your cost per hire will be.

How to improve your cost per hire

If you want to reduce your spending on hiring, aim to reduce your cost per hire.

Here are some of the most effective ways to decrease your costs:

1. Improve your time to fill

As we’ve mentioned, the shorter your time to fill is, the cheaper your cost per hire is.

So, do everything you can to decrease your time to fill, and it should result in a cheaper cost per hire.

2. Invest in internal employee development

The more you invest in your existing employees, the less reliant you become on hiring new candidates.

Dedicate preparation time for your employees with their future at your company in mind, and you’re better prepared to deal with unexpected issues, such as personnel changes.

For example, if a high-up team member leaves, you can hire from within the company or start from scratch. Preferably, you already have an established team you’ve been investing in where at least one of these employees will likely be qualified to take over from the previous team member.

Being able to hire from within dramatically decreases your need for external hiring, reducing your overall cost per hire in the process.

3. Utilise social media

When sourcing new talent, you should try to find cheaper ways to reach the top candidates.

From spreading your brand awareness and advertising job vacancies to attracting both active and passive candidates, social media can prove a powerful tool.

Almost 60% of job seekers use social media in their job search, so you could likely source some great candidates through those platforms.

Hiring diversity

This crucial talent acquisition metric matters now more than ever! And not just from a legal standpoint.

Working on your hiring diversity metric is one of the best ways to eliminate discrimination from your hiring process, giving all candidates equal opportunities, no matter their race, religion, gender, disability, orientation, or age.

Having a more diverse workforce is not only a moral goal, as it benefits both your candidates and your organisation.

Benefits of improving your hiring diversity metric include:

• Greater company success, as a more diverse workforce, has been proven to increase innovation, creativity, and financial turnover, among other things.
• Encourages varied perspectives
• Improves team relationships and communication

How to improve your hiring diversity

A diverse workforce provides numerous benefits for your company and workforce.

Here are some of the best ways to promote diversity in your hiring process:

1. Conduct a diversity hiring audit

Before you can improve the diversity of your hiring process, you need to have a clear idea of where you’re starting from.

Try to identify which parts of your recruitment process are inhibiting diversity while looking for any bottlenecks.

Analyse your diversity hiring data and determine which elements of your acquisition process need to change to incorporate more diversity.

2. Start with sourcing

Remember, establishing a more diverse workforce starts at the beginning of your hiring process.

Consider how you can reach and appeal to a more diverse array of candidates at the sourcing step of your acquisition strategy.

For example, you could re-word your job postings to appeal to a wider audience. You could also demonstrate your existing workplace diversity to prove to potential candidates that it’s one of your priorities.

3. Consider blind hiring

Blind hiring is any acquisition technique anonymising candidate information, meaning recruiters and hiring managers make unbiased decisions.

Whether removing names, education, gender, and other demographics, tons of online services and software are available to help you anonymise your hiring process.

Offer acceptance rate

Your offer acceptance rate compares the number of successful candidates offered the position against the number of candidates who accepted.

If you’re wondering how to calculate your offer acceptance rate, simply divide the number of offers by the number of acceptances.

The higher your acceptance rate, the more appealing your company is to top candidates and the more competitive your hiring strategy is.

If you have a low acceptance rate, it might be a sign that your talent acquisition process needs amending.

Benefits of a high offer acceptance rate include:

• It indicates a successful recruitment process
• Cost efficiency
• Improves your brand as an employer
• Higher candidate retention rates

How to improve your offer acceptance rate

Having a higher acceptance rate could save your company valuable time and resources.

Here are some of the best ways to up your offer acceptance rate:

1. Write more accurate job descriptions

The more accurate your job descriptions are, and the more detail they go into, the less likely candidates will turn down.

Good job descriptions should accurately convey a comprehensive list of responsibilities and duties, required skills and experience, working conditions, salary and other financial compensation information, working models, and more.

2. Analyse your compensation

Although money isn’t everything, the amount you offer candidates could be a factor in your offer acceptance rate.

Top candidates are likely to have other offers or interest from competing companies, so your salary and financial compensation amounts must be competitive for your industry.

The more enticing your offer is, the higher your acceptance rate will be.

3. Streamline your recruitment process

If you want to keep candidates interested, you can’t keep them waiting for too long.

If your hiring process is too long, or you take too long to offer a candidate a position, they might have already accepted an offer elsewhere.

By shortening your hiring process, you’ll be more likely to retain the interest of competitive candidates.

Bespoke tech recruitment services to fulfil your hiring needs

Here at Revoco, we’ve developed an array of bespoke tools to enhance your talent acquisition process, both for your company and your candidates.

From outsourcing to recruitment on demand, we have everything you need to maximise your ability to hire and retain the best tech talent available.

To find out more about our specialist recruitment services, get in touch with our team today.