How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Recruitment and Selection Process

May 9, 2023

Matt Gainsford

There seems to be one unique challenge that plagues every business regardless of its size, age, prestige, or even the industry in which it operates. This challenge is staffing — and we’re not necessarily talking about finding the right talent to hire, but rather retaining talent. 

High Angle View Of A Male Manager Interviewing Female Applicant In Office

Each year, low retention rates end up costing companies billions of dollars, and to help mitigate this risk, many of these companies are starting to partner with recruiting agencies. 

Great job recruiters do so much more than just locate qualified talent for your business. Their recruitment and selection process has a proven track record, their strategy is refined, and their turnover rates are consistently low. This might sound simple, but the only way to truly accomplish this is by measuring the effectiveness of the recruitment and selection process, analyzing the data, and making improvements. 

Here are a few ideas to consider when measuring the effectiveness of your recruitment and selection process:

Why Measure Your Recruitment and Selection Process
What to Look for and Focus on During the Recruitment Process
What Does a Quality Hire Mean
What Assessment Tools Should You Use

Why Measure your Recruitment and Selection Process

So, what’s the importance of the recruitment and selection process? According to an article published by PWC, 88% of business executives are reporting that turnover rates are higher than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic. While it’s difficult to identify one specific cause for these numbers, there is one very effective way to hedge against it, and that is to improve the efficiency of your recruitment strategy. 

When attempting to combat high turnover rates, many businesses will look internally at things like their corporate culture, upward mobility, compensation, and benefits. And while all of these do play a role in employee turnover, it’s not the only factor. 

Employee recruitment and selection play a critical role, as well, and yet it’s often overlooked when trying to reduce high turnover rates. 

Measuring your hiring strategy is the only way to ensure a positive feedback loop that will help improve your hiring process. Making improvements to your recruitment process is the only way to ensure that quality applicants end up in your pipeline. In turn, having a higher quality applicant pool will allow you to better match the right person with the right job – or as we like to say, putting the right person in the right seat.

What to Look for During the Recruitment Process

At Titus Talent, we’re able to provide businesses with a 1-year guarantee on new hires – which is something offered by very few staffing agencies. This has been made possible through a close analysis of key hiring metrics. If you’re looking to improve your recruitment strategy, pay close attention to the following:

How Much Does it Cost to Hire?

Hiring is expensive! There are not only costs associated with generating applications, creating job postings, outreach, interviewing, etc, but also onboarding and training fees, as well as equipment purchases. ADP wrote an article on this topic and determined that the average cost of hiring an employee in 2019 was $4,129. The longer the job search takes, the more expensive it is to fill the position. 

For businesses with high turnover rates, employee recruitment must be done more frequently, thereby compounding the costs associated with hiring. They’ll be interviewing and onboarding new employees more often, and will therefore pay hiring costs more frequently. Not to mention, when an employee either resigns or is terminated, financial resources need to be spent on restructuring and transitioning employees out of the company.

How Long Does it Take to Hire?

The time it takes to fill a position is a great indicator of efficiency. According to a survey by Hire Vue, the average time to fill a position is 42 days. If you’re moving at a rate that is too fast, you might not be taking enough time to thoroughly screen each applicant. In contrast, if you move too slowly, quality talent will likely receive competing job offers and that may reduce your chances of securing the right person for the right seat. 

The timeline to hire will also differ slightly depending on several factors such as your industry, seniority of the position, current applicant network, location, and more. Finding the right balance for your company will take time. This is why many companies choose to contact a professional job recruiter – since established staffing agencies have already collected and analyzed this data and will be able to provide a more accurate and optimized timeline. 

How Many Applicants Should be Interviewed?

Finding the right amount of applicants to interview is another unique challenge in the recruitment and selection process. The more candidates you interview, the more time the process will take, and as we mentioned earlier, this can work against you. Since top-tier talent is likely to receive several competing offers, allowing too much time to pass increases the likelihood of them accepting an offer from another company.

In contrast, not interviewing enough applicants reduces the chances of finding the right person for the right seat. Hired.com recommends talking with 7-10 applicants per open position. They’ve determined that this number provides the best balance between speed and efficiency, while also retaining a quality hire.

What Does a Quality Hire Mean?

So what does a quality hire mean? A quality hire is simply another way to measure the amount of value a new employee will contribute to the long-term success of a company. It’s a difficult metric to analyze because it focuses exclusively on long-term performance. However, if you look at areas like turnover data, manager satisfaction, and new hire performance, you’ll be able to collect some short-term information on the quality of your talent pipeline. 

Moreover, we can trace this data back to its source for better analysis. For example, if there is a particular company, university, or strategy that continues to produce talent that yields high satisfaction rates, it may be worth investing more of your resources in those places.

To accurately measure quality of hire you need a set of objective metrics to weigh performance against; we call these Performance Objectives. For a new hire, this might look like what they are expected to achieve in the first 30, 60, and 90 days, and for a seasoned employee, how they align with the directives set out in their Performance Profile.

What Assessment Tools Should You Use?

In many cases, managers will use the information collected during the interviewing process to make their hiring decisions. While this is a common strategy, relying only on this information can sometimes hurt your hiring process. 

This isn’t to say that interviews aren’t needed – because they absolutely are – but studies have shown that there are better assessment tools for the recruitment and selection process. One reason for this is that interviews don’t measure a person’s cognitive reasoning or motivational drivers as well as tests like The Predictive Index.

Using assessment tools like The Predictive Index will help you understand what factors contribute to certain workplace behaviors. If you’re a hiring manager, you can expect this tool to help you get a better sense of how well a particular applicant is going to fit into their new role. This is done by providing context on the following:

How quickly they’ll be able to learn new job responsibilities and requirements
How well they’ll be able to work with other team members
How well they’ll be able to understand the needs and roles of their team

Making use of the right assessment tools is also a great way to optimize your recruitment and selection process. Because of its ability to quickly provide valuable information on a candidate’s personality and motivations, many staffing agencies will rely on an assessment tool like the PI Index to pre-screen their applicants before the interviewing process begins. This allows us to increase the number of applications we can accept without drastically increasing the time it takes to hire. 

Our Recruitment and Selection Process

At Titus Talent, we’ve been successfully helping businesses with their staffing needs for many years and have done so by evolving our relationship with the staffing industry from simple job recruitment to a more complex people strategy consulting firm. Our recruiters look beyond the standard hiring metrics by focusing on the Head, the Heart, and the Briefcase of a candidate. We use this data to fill our talent pipeline; this way when a business consults with us, we have an immediate pool of pre-screened, qualified candidates that we can start connecting with. We call it Hire for Performance.

We also know how important it is to be efficient at employee recruitment and selection. That is why we’ve spent years researching new ways to make our recruitment process more productive. When you invest in a new hire, you’re not only looking for someone who fits into the corporate culture but understands the vision of the company and is eager to grow along with it. When the right person is hired for the right seat, turnover rates decline and the company begins to grow exponentially, and we’ve built our business on that very concept. 

Titus’ partner-focused approach has created a high-performing, award-winning culture that consistently places the right person in the right seat!