Beyond Recruiting Metrics: Building Relationships

“All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.” -Bob Burg

Many recruiting professionals now use dozens of transactional and quantitative metrics to measure their placements. With the growing popularity of applicant tracking ssystems, it’s easier than ever before for organizations to collect data on placements and build up a pipeline of potential candidates. But with “So much to do, so little time,” it’s easy to become lost in a maze of useless numbers. And metrics that count, namely key performance indicators, are either not adequately tracked or not acted upon. So, how can corporate recruiters properly measure their performance and Return on Investment without spending all of their waking hours analyzing, benchmarking and creating colorful graphs to justify their existence to senior management?

Relationship Building

Recruiters need to focus on building relationships, networking and 21st century attraction marketing. Why? Because ultimately, the quality of your hires is the only metric that truly measures your performance and adds to the company’s bottom line. Talent Acquisition specialist Stephen Lowisz notes, “The recruiter of today has to move from being transactionally driven to relationship-driven. Recruiters are now sales professionals responsible for prospecting, building relationships and advancing the sale.” Lowisz believes today’s recruiting metrics  should reinforce the new focus on relationships to source and place high quality candidates.

Referrals and Networking

What does developing relationships have to do with the quality of your hires? Quite a lot, in fact. Today’s recruiters must cast a wide net across multiple channels. And leveraging the untapped power of social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, requires an expertise in brand marketing and social engagement. Moreover, statistics show that the best candidates with the best retention rates fall into a recruiter’s lap through referrals and networking. And the cost-per-hire is significantly less than placements secured through other channels. Additionally, placements obtained through referrals shorten the time-to-fill metric.

Quality of Hire

Recruiters can spin their wheels if they prefer, measuring standard process efficiency metrics, such as cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, number of positions filled, recruitment efficiency ratio and more. While efficiency metrics are important to provide a snapshot of short-term costs, they are ineffective in showing the long-term costs to the company, which can become more burdensome and damaging. Recruiter.com notes that most recruiting metrics are costly to collect and benchmark, useless and not highly actionable. It’s much more informative and cost-effective to spend the majority of your valuable time tracking effectiveness metrics, including new hire performance, manager satisfaction, turnover rate for new recruits, performance/quality of hire and referral rates. Indeed, the Corporate Leadership Council advises, “Measuring ‘true’ quality metrics,” that place importance on value over efficiency. The placement of quality hires results in a long-term investment in your company. The right match produces employee satisfaction, greater productivity, retention and greater profits.

Don’t Settle for Short-Term Goals

With an unpredictable economy and risk-averse hiring managers, it’s tempting to track metrics that focus on short-term savings, such as cost-per-hire. But the long-term costs of placing poor quality candidates can be astronomical. Frequent turnovers cause workplace disruption, poor morale and employee dissatisfaction. Quality employees are the lifeblood of an organization. Building strong relationships to effectively recruit the best and the brightest is worth the effort. What organization wouldn’t benefit from a strategic investment in its future?