7 Recruitment Analytics Formulas to Elevate Your Hiring

Why should I care about recruitment analytics?

The more you know about your recruitment process, the more you can do to improve it.

Recruitment analytics are your best friend when it comes to understanding the ins and outs of your hiring process — and that in-depth, frontline knowledge means you can improve the experience for candidates and company.

Here are some other reasons why the modern game of recruitment is all about analytics:

Find and solve recruitment blockers

If you know where you’re tripping up, you can take action to uncork the bottleneck. Analytics are perfect for highlighting problem areas in your recruitment funnel so you know exactly where to focus your efforts. But it’s not all about the “bad” stuff. The right analytics can also show you where things are going right so you can double down on what’s already working.

Analytics save you time

With the best candidates getting snapped up within a matter of days, recruiting today is all about a speedy, candidate-driven process. Once you know how long each stage of your hiring process takes, you can work to accelerate the experience for everyone.

Stay ahead of the game

Do you want to leap ahead of the competition? Yeah, we thought so! With the right recruitment analytics, you can start to pick up on key talent trends and predict where they’re headed next.

Recruitment Analytics 101: Leveling up

To level up your recruitment process with high-impact data, you need a good handle on the recruitment analytics basics. From operational reporting to predictive analytics, here’s your guide to levels one through three:

Level 1: Operational Reporting

When it comes to operational reporting, day-to-day data analysis is the name of the game. The goal is to track and monitor everyday operations, generating reports that help you understand how your recruitment is performing in real time. 

This boots-on-the-ground analysis allows companies to make quick decisions and easy changes where needed, whether you’re identifying recruitment bottlenecks or trying to unpack employee churn.

Level 2: Advanced Reporting

Advanced reporting goes a step beyond operational reporting, providing more in-depth insights into your recruitment. 

This typically involves analyzing historical data to identify trends and patterns, then using that info to create a more comprehensive portrait of your performance. By moving a step beyond the mundane (yet foundational) operational analytics, advanced reporting helps identify even more opportunities for improvement.

From identifying which recruitment channels are the most effective to tracking core competencies, these data insights are often strategic and forward-looking.

Level 3: Predictive Analytics

This stage is where you’re really elevating from standard data reporting to deeper analytics. 

This might mean using statistical models and machine learning algorithms to analyze data and make predictions about future events. The goal of this eyes-forward data is to help companies make evidence-based decisions, forecasting outcomes based on past patterns.

Predictive analytics can be especially useful for high-volume hiring managers and recruiters, helping them predict how likely potential candidates are to accept an offer or charting the probable performance of new hires.

At the employee engagement level, predictive analytics can also help you better support your employees. For example, if the analytics show that productivity dips around the holidays, you can create incentives (like performance-based bonuses) to keep morale high.

What are the key recruitment reports to use?

Now for the hard part. There are countless ways to measure your recruitment data — the trick is choosing the methods that deserve your time and attention.

Here’s a list of key need-to-know recruitment metrics, plus easy-to-use tactics to help you implement them:

1. Pipeline report

What’s it for?

Hiring is all about efficiency — that means tracking your candidates from day one.

Pipeline metrics help do this by keeping count of candidates at each stage of the recruitment process, so you can track how long it takes to move each individual forward (or not).

You’ll be able to answer key recruitment questions like:

• How long does it take each department to fill a role?
• At what stage do we weed out most of our applicants?

You can also compare reports by job title or department, then concentrate your efforts on the parts of the business that need the most support.

How does it work?

To ace your pipeline reports, you need to track the exact numbers and percentages of candidates moving forward plus how long it takes.

The most useful recruitment pipeline reports are usually Funnel Progression, Time in Stage by Position, and Time in Stage by Category. Which means you need to keep track of how many and when candidates move forward plus how long it takes each department to fill a role within a specific timeframe.

Doing this manually can be a major time-suck.⌛

That’s why any applicant tracking system (ATS) worth its weight will offer automatic pipeline reports — saving you precious time and money on data collection and analysis.

2. Sources report

What’s it for?

If you’ve ever wondered exactly where your top applicants come from, you’re going to LOVE source reports.

Source reports help you answer the following questions:

• How have our application metrics changed over time?
• Are our job ads pulling in enough applications?
• Which job board is the most effective?

In a nutshell, source reports allow you to see how many applicants come from each job board or elsewhere, so you can see what works (and what doesn’t!)

How does it work?

Because most applicants come through online portals, it can be very difficult to DIY your own source reports.

Fortunately, with the rise of cloud based recruiting solutions, there are plenty of tools out there that can do it for you. 🙌🏻

Job board analytics

Some job boards (like Indeed, Glassdoor, or Linkedin) track certain recruitment analytics for you. 

Most of them will show how many applicants have read your job postings and which candidates applied through their portal. The downside is, you won’t be able to catch the candidates who head straight to your website via the job board link unless you close the gaps using your web analytics — and getting accurate stats this way can be quite a chore.

Your ATS

The best ATS systems will allow you to automatically publish your job ads to multiple different job boards in one click. You can see which job boards get your ad the most attention and find out exactly where your top applicants are coming from.

3. Time-to-fill report

What is it for?

True HR professionals know time is everything in talent acquisition. 

Time-to-fill reports help you and your HR department to answer the following questions:

• Are our roles taking too long to fill?
• How efficient is the recruitment process?
• At what point do we encounter most obstacles?

You can use this metric to figure out how efficient your processes are, pinpoint blockers, and take action to reduce your time-to-fill.

How does it work?

If you’re one of the lucky ones, your ATS will automatically generate a full time-to-fill report for you.

If not, you can do it the old-fashioned way and calculate your time-to-fill manually using this formula:

SUM of your time-to-fill for each role DIVIDED by number of roles you filled in the same period EQUALS your average time-to-fill in days.

For example, you made 3 hires last month and they took 11, 10, and 9 days to fill.

Your sum is 11 + 10 + 9 = 30 / 3 = 10-day average time-to-fill.

4. Quality of hire

What’s it for?

When it comes to becoming a recruitment analytics pro, quality of hire (QoH) is your ace in the hole. It’s basically the litmus test that reveals whether your recruitment process is truly effective.

But only 27% of organizations measure quality of hire. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need to be included in that minority.

Quality of hire metrics help you answer the following questions:

• What is the value of a particular job role?
• Is a role worth the time and money put into hiring?
• How does our hiring process compare with the competition?

How does it work?

There’s a lot you need to know before diving in with this one — and you’ll need a bunch of indicator metrics before you can gauge your final percentage.

Once you’ve got the hang of it though, QoH is easy.

Here are some of the indicator metrics to work with. Bear in mind, you’ll need to create a scoring system to mark each candidate (check out our QoH number-crunching article for the full list of indicator metrics to work with):

• Time-to-fill
• Assessment and aptitude tests
• Job performance
• Employee retention rates

Once you’ve got all (or at least some) of these metrics in place, here’s your formula:

Add your existing indicators together and divide the total by the number of indicators used.

For example, if you’ve measured your job performance (total score of 70), employee retention (81) and time-to-fill (89), simply add them together and divide by 3.

In this case your sum would be 70 + 81 + 89 = 240 / 3 = 80% 

You can use this formula for individual employees or the entire company, simply use individual-employee indicator scores or the averages of all employees.

5. Sourced hire report

What’s it for?

You already know sourced hires can be an excellent way to generate high-quality hires. But do you know who on your team is bringing in the most rockstars?

With the sourced hire report, you can track:

• Total sourced candidates
• Percentage of change in total candidates from previous timeframe
• Average score per candidate
• Previous average score
• Percentage of change in averages scores from previous timeframe

How does it work?

To calculate your sourced hire report, start by listing the number of team members actively sourcing talent. From there, simply compare the total number of sourced candidates in a given timeframe, then compare that number to a previous timeframe to see the change in percentage.

So if your hiring manager sourced 30 candidates in the two-month period from October to November, and 25 candidates during that same time last year, that would be a 20% increase in candidates sourced.

More concerned with quality vs. volume? No problem. 

Many recruiting platforms (Breezy included 😉) can automatically generate a Candidate Score by Sourcer report so you can see which members of your team are bringing in the best candidates.

6. Recruited candidates report

What’s it for?

Your recruitment partners are crucial to your hiring success. But do you really know how well they’re performing?

The recruiter-hiring manager relationship can easily become strained if both parties aren’t on the same page about the KPIs that matter. With the right reporting tools, you can track both the volume and quality of candidates your external recruiters are bringing in so you know exactly where to focus your future conversations.

A recruited candidates report gets you on the same page about all the key metrics, including:

• Total recruited candidates
• Percentage change from the previous timeframe
• Average score per candidate
• Previous average score
• Percentage of change in averages from previous timeframe

How does it work?

For this one, you’ll want to follow the exact same steps as with your sourced candidates report.

If your recruiter sourced 86 candidates in Q4 and 100 candidates in Q3, that’s a drop of -14%.

In this example, you can clearly see that it’s time to work with your recruiter to pinpoint the reason for the decrease and work together to find ways to get the numbers back on track. 

But as mentioned, volume isn’t the only recruitment metric you can track. With a scorecard-enabled ATS, you can automatically track candidate score history by recruiter to understand which partners are bringing you not only the most, but the best candidates.

7. Cost per hire

What’s it for?

Time is money…but money is also money. And without a handle on your finances, streamlining your recruitment process is nearly impossible.

That’s why understanding cost per hire (CpH) is vital.

CpH helps you unpack the financial impact of your recruitment efforts for a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not.

Here are just a few of the things you can learn from cost per hire:

• How much you’re actually spending on hiring
• Whether your recruitment strategy is cost-effective
• Ways you can streamline your budget

How does it work?

Calculating cost per hire is actually pretty simple. All you have to do is sum up your recruitment costs for a specific period and divide it by the number of hires within that period. After a little bit of math-ing, you’ll be well on your way to maximizing your recruitment ROI.

For example, if you spend $5,000 in 1 month to hire two people, your CpH would look like: $5,000 / 2 = $2,500 cost per hire.