How many times have you been asked to show your value or prove your HR “worth” with metrics… only to not know where to start? Over the past 10-15 years as HR underwent the transformation from being Personnel departments to “strategic partners,” we finally have a seat at the table. But now that we’re there, how do we continue to show the value we provide to the business, on a continuous basis?

Simply showing the number of transactions we’ve processed, no longer has any value to your company’s bottom line. Nor does providing a detailed list of the activities you complete on a daily basis.

We must start connecting the actions we take, to the overall business goals – without it, HR will continue to be seen as an “expense” department and not as a profit-generating department. Which HR is. At its core, HR is the glue so to speak, driving connection and engagement with every business’ most important asset: the employees.

Let’s Get Started

When you look at other departments such as Finance or Marketing, they are constantly showing their value with numbers, metrics and analytics. They spent X number of dollars, results in Y profit – and so on.

HR can do this too – here’s where to start.

Recruiting Metrics

For most of us, starting with metrics that are easily available is the best place to start. Recruiting metrics tend to be easiest as most companies use a form of an Applicant Tracking Software system to process Talent Acquisition activities. So start there.

You should be tracking, at a minimum:

1. Number of open requisitions (reqs) per recruiter
2. Time to fill for requisitions
3. Total number of hires
4. Diversity information
5. Candidate satisfaction
6. Manager satisfaction

Likely you will have access to other metrics, such as the time each step of the process takes on average and so on – but to start, these should be your main areas of focus. Your ATS system should have the first four available immediately, but the final two will take some time to track down (more to come on this).

Number of Open Reqs

This metrics will show you how efficient your recruiting is – and detect early on when you need to staff up (or down) to support your company’s recruiting effort. This also can identify easily, areas that may have higher turnover or special needs in getting candidates onboard.

Time to Fill

The time to fill metric will show you how long it takes from a position being needed to having someone accept an offer. Basically, how long it takes to walk through all of the different steps to get a new employee hired. This metric is especially important for you to know, to understand your workforce planning needs – and help with anticipating needs for key positions, so nothing sits vacant to the detriment of the business.

Total Number of Hires

The total number of people you hire within a specific timeframe (you can track by month, quarter, year, etc.) will help the business with workforce planning – and project growth rates for future timeframes. It will also show the health of the organization and reflect on the overall health of your culture.

Diversity Information

Tracking diversity information is not just something you have to do, but you should want to. Having diversity in the workplace, fosters innovation. Understanding where you lacking diverse candidates (or employees), will help you break down any invisible (and dangerous) biases that may exist and help drive better hiring practices and identify training needs.

Candidate and Manager Satisfaction Rates

These are two “softer” numbers so to speak. They are not usually something that’s tracked by an ATS, but something that HR has to actively seek out. And it’s very easy to do!

First, the importance of these metrics: based on these numbers, you will be able to instantly tell if your hiring practices are working and that you’re selecting the right candidates for your company’s culture.

These are critical metrics for the long-term success of your company, culture and turnover rates.

To start tracking these metrics, you will need to create two surveys – you can do it through a fancy survey company, or simply through something like SurveyMonkey or WuFoo: one for candidates, one for managers. The survey should ask these questions (shown below for candidates, you may update the questions for the managers’ survey):

1. Now that you’re in the role, is the position as it was described to you during the recruiting process?
2. Are you satisfied that you accepted this position?
3. Is the role you accepted, meeting your expectations?
4. Do you feel the company’s culture was accurately described during the recruiting process?

You may add additional questions about the process as you see fit, but these are the key items you want to learn about. And while you don’t see the recommend measurements, remember that these are metrics – so the more number-based you can get the better (Likert scales tend to work well).

These surveys should be sent out once the new employee has been in the role for a set-amount of time, so they can share actual data. We recommend doing these surveys no sooner than six to eight weeks in the role.

Final Thoughts

With these six metrics, you are on-track to providing more quantitative analysis for your onboarding process – the point in which employees join your organization. We’ll be detailing metrics for HR daily activities in our next post in this series.