Setting up 11 SMART recruitment goals for your company – [Hyreo Guide]

The talent competition grows stronger as the demand for specialized skills grows unabated, compounded by the ever-shrinking talent pool of skilled resources. The ability of the firm to weather this talent storm, has a direct bearing on the company’s business and financial growth.

With an overarching objective of hiring highly qualified candidates, it becomes imperative to continuously measure and optimize the recruitment process. A data-driven recruitment strategy with key talent acquisition metrics empowers the hiring team to attract and hire top talent.  

Let’s take a look at some of the critical recruitment goals and metrics that expedite and magnify the value of your recruitment process.

What are Recruitment Goals

Recruitment goals are designed to help the recruitment team measure their current success and strategize to make more informed hiring decisions. Setting and tracking against clear and actionable goals helps to not only hire great talent but also reduces the overall cost of the hiring.

Before setting the recruitment goals, it is important to perform a due-diligence on the current performance and improvise accordingly:

• Review the strengths and the shortcomings of the current process objectively
• Define high-level outcomes in terms of hiring talent, recruitment effort & cost with clear ownership and accountability
• Adapt and align to the new company business strategy
• Inclusion of DE&I goals

At a high level, the recruitment goals help validate the hiring strategy and decisions on an ongoing basis.

9 Advantages of setting Recruitment Goals

Hiring top talent quickly on optimal recruitment effort and cost is key to fuel company growth and deliver significant ROI. Clearly and prudently devised recruitment goals help pave the way to accelerate your hiring of high-quality talent with lower attrition.

The setting of key recruitment goals benefits the recruitment team, organization and the talent in the following ways:  

•  Higher conversions – Tracking on key conversion metrics can help prioritize and resolve root causes of offer dropouts (such as poor articulation of role, lower engagement with candidates during hiring, longer hiring process, poor company reviews etc.)
• Higher productivity – With more skilled workers, productivity improves significantly within the workforce
• Increased revenue – Having highly qualified talent drives better business outcomes in terms of growth and revenue
• Higher retention – Achievement of business targets impacts the talent positively via better growth opportunities and higher compensation & benefits, improving employee satisfaction leading to higher retention and employee referrals
• Optimized recruitment effort – Remedial action based on recruitment process efficacy metrics helps reduce non-productive effort
• Specialized roles hiring – The optimization of recruitment time and effort helps focus on more impactful talent acquisition tasks such as hiring for specialized roles and other critical roles that enable the company to expand operations and services strategically
• Better customer satisfaction – Hiring highly qualified and specialized talent on time helps deliver exponential value to customers, thereby increasing the customer satisfaction by leaps and bounds
• Better candidate experience – Evaluation of and remedial action for key recruitment metrics (Time-to-hire, Offer acceptance rate, Attrition rate etc.) enhances the candidate experience significantly by facilitating better engagement with recruiter and hiring managers early on   
• Improved Employer branding – All recruitment goals impact the Employer branding positively by creating a better candidate experience, driving higher conversions and thereby an enhanced social branding. Focus on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion goals also enhances the social brandingLinkedIn states that diverse companies earn 2.5 times higher revenue generation per employee and inclusive teams are over 35% more high-performing.

Recruitment CRM offers significant value here in terms of optimized recruitment effort through automation and a comprehensive view of the candidate journey. Real-time stats, reports and insights, also enable the hiring team to intervene appropriately and promote a strong brand image.

Top 11 SMART Recruitment Metrics

Recruitment metrics help evaluate the effectiveness of the current hiring processes, find points of failure and implement corrective measures to continuously evolve the recruitment process. SMART hiring metrics that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound metrics, enable alignment to a clear recruitment objective and track against an action plan.

KPIs are essential to creating actionable goals with a view to streamline and optimize recruitment processes. These are also valuable when it comes to highlighting and rewarding top recruiters in the organization.

Listed below are a few of the critical metrics to jump-start the process:

• #1 Applicant traffic –
  It is the volume of applications/profiles received against an open position and is a clear indication of the social branding as well as the clarity and appeal of the role advertisement, independent of the source of hiring.
• #2 Time to fill –
  It refers to the time taken to hire against an open position or as a replacement for attrition. While many factors influence this metric such as market demand and supply for the skill, it is a clear indication of the readiness and efficacy of the hiring team as it is dependent on their ability to predict hiring patterns and have resource pipelines or other sources lined up to hire quickly and on demand.
• #3 Time to hire –
  This metric measures the time taken for a candidate to traverse through the different stages of the recruitment process. While the specialized and senior roles would take longer based on the level of scrutiny and rounds of evaluation, it has a direct bearing on the candidate experience and is a key metric to track and take corrective action on.
• #4 Diversity of candidates –
  Diversity of the workforce is important to building a great work culture with a sense of belonging and fairness. Diversity metrics provide meaningful insight into the workforce demographics and inclusion practices and so should be tracked.
• #5 Source of hire –
  With diverse sources of talent such as referrals, career sites & social media, it is important to track and measure the volume and quality of the talent sourced to be able to leverage suitably to hire top talent.
• #6 Offer acceptance rate –
  It is one of the most crucial and insightful recruitment metrics, helping identify key process failure points and root causes for offer declines (such as lack of clarity on role expectations, unresolved candidate queries, lack of transparency in terms of total benefits etc). 
• #7 Cost per hire –
  It is the average cost of hiring talent and is equivalent to the total recruitment spend against the total number of hires. It is a financial metric that denotes what hiring truly costs the company in terms of internal (referral and/or reskilling cost) and external hiring (agency, advertisement costs etc.).
• #8 Cost of open position –
  It is the cost incurred/money lost due to a position not being filled on time. It’s a straightforward metric for revenue generating positions but not so for cost positions. This metric helps the hiring team to prioritize when hiring for open positions.
• #9 Quality of hire –
  With hiring top talent being a priority, this metric is an important one and refers to the hires who have positively impacted the business and organization through their contributions, both tangible and intangible. Based on feedback from business teams, this metric provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of the hiring sources and hiring process but is difficult to track being subjective.
• #10 Attrition rate –
  It is the average turnover or churn of employees in a given tenure. While it is dependent on a lot of factors, attrition, especially in the first year, helps understand if the job postings articulate the roles and responsibilities clearly and indicate the level of communication and transparency during hiring.
• #11 Candidate NPS –
  Candidate NPS gives clarity on the efficacy and engagement of the recruitment process and the likelihood of them recommending the company to other potential candidates or consider as a prospective employer in the future. Candidate experience having a direct bearing on the success in hiring top talent, it becomes critical to collect feedback through all of the recruitment stages.

How to use Goals or KPIs to measure recruitment effectiveness

While recruitment goals are essential to achieving your business goals, it is important to select the ones that align with and add more value to your overall business strategy. Integrate these SMART metrics or KPIs into your recruitment process to measure success and improvise continuously based on priorities.

• Recruitment benchmarking – Periodic reviews of recruitment goals helps evaluate and validate current performance of the recruitment process as per industry standards and helps refine goals and incorporate best practices.  
• Trend analysis of KPIs – Analyzing the recruitment metrics trends throws light on the success against key goals of hiring top talent, saving business money, saving recruitment time and money, all the while building a strong social brand.
• Build a robust talent pipeline – Use key metrics to understand talent gaps and build an effective talent pool of candidates for hard to staff roles with niche skill sets and/or high attrition. Building a strong brand, engagement with passive candidates, potential candidates and upskilling/re-skilling of internal talent serve as invaluable sources of talent.
• Measure effectiveness of recruitment funnel – In order to source talent quickly and effectively, it is important to have a robust recruitment funnel of diverse and proven sources of top talent. KPIs are useful in measuring and improving upon the efficacy of these channels to source and hire highly qualified talent who contribute positively to business and company culture.
• Application of AI & automation – With the increasing need to drive up efficiency and effectiveness while enhancing the candidate experience and company brand, it becomes imperative to leverage Recruitment CRM with inbuilt AI and automation appropriately to boost business bottom-line and performance. A feature-rich CRM with real-time stats, reports and insights, enables the hiring team to intervene appropriately and promote a strong brand image.

Wrapping Up

Recruitment being predominantly a number game of hiring top talent, viable in both a business and financial sense, employing SMART goals helps showcase the true value of the recruitment process. 

Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound recruitment metrics highlight the efficacy of the recruitment process, the hiring of the right talent, business money saved while validating the ROI on recruitment investment. 

Devising and executing a data-driven and dynamic recruitment strategy with the SMART goals and KPIs will help uncover risks before they become challenges, helping you track strongly towards success.

Also explore:
10 Creative and Innovative Recruiting Ideas to Find Top Talent!
All you need to know about Virtual Recruiting
6 Recruiting Reports to know about

FAQs related to Recruitment Goals