Ep. 32: Starting with Metrics – Recruiting

Melissa Anzman (00:00): We are the glue driving connection and engagement with their most important aspect and asset the employees. And we do that through metrics. Hi, I'm Melissa Anzman, an HR practitioner turned CEO of a thriving employee experience company, but it wasn't all that long ago that I worked as an HR business partner, responsible for increasing employee engagement at companies nationwide. And I struggled to move the needle, even after trying everything under the sun. Fast-Forward past many failed tactics and lessons learned, and you'll see how I've been able to crack the code and replicated at companies of all sizes for creating true engagement and doing HR work that matters work that changes the lives of leaders, HR professionals, and employees. By focusing on the employee experience, I created the rethink HR podcast to give you actionable step-by-step strategies to help you make an impact. If you're an HR leader or one on the rise, who's looking to stop spinning your wheels, doing the same tired activities that aren't driving results, or you want to have a career.

Melissa Anzman (01:10): You love, you're in the right place. Let's get started. Welcome back to the HR metrics series, where I am helping you learn, learn how to bring more HR metrics. So more objective measurements into your HR practice, regardless of what type of HR role you have. And regardless of your experience or background with metrics, analytics, numbers, math, all the things, cause you are chatting with someone who is not really a math nerd. So that being said, let's get started today. I want to talk about where to actually start with your HR metrics. So in the last episode, episode, number 31, we're taught, we were all about how to start with your first metrics. So if you're not sure how to even go about the process, check out episode 30, one of the rethink HR podcast to help you get started with that today. I want to go deeper into a role specific type of where to start.

Melissa Anzman (02:12): What, so let's start where we think of metrics the most, or we've probably tracked them the longest, which is talent, acquisition or recruiting. So this is an area where we have an easy way, so to speak of measuring our worth in HR. That thing that we have been asked to do over and over again of like show us your worth, show us why we should keep investing in HR, show us, prove to us what you do and metrics help us do that. But if we don't know where to start, we're not quite sure what to do, and that's not our fault. We went under that huge transformation from being personnel, which was a ferry very different than, you know, now being human resources and which we're transforming into probably the people employee experience departments, where we're expected to be strategic partners, not only just have a seat at the table, but also be an active voice at the table.

Melissa Anzman (03:09): And now that we're there though, we haven't really evolved the way that we do HR to be able to show the value that we provide to the business on a continuous basis. So how do we show that we are not just a profit taker, but we are a profit maker for the company and how we do that is with metrics. So simply showing the number of transactions we've processed or, you know, all of the people we support. That's not going to have any value to our company's bottom line anymore, nor does that help you detail out the list of activities that you've completed on a daily basis to sort of show the action and activities that you're doing. We have to start connecting the actions that we take to the overall business goals and the employee experience, because without it, we are just going to continue to be seen as an expense versus a profit generating department, which we are like, let me just sort of drill that down.

Melissa Anzman (04:15): HR is a profit generating department at its core. We are the glue driving connection and engagement with their most important aspect and asset the employees. And we do that through metrics. We show that through metrics. And if we look around to our peer departments, maybe it's finance or marketing or R and D, they are constantly showing their value with numbers, with metrics, with analytics at a bare minimum. They're saying I spent this amount of money on this thing, which resulted in Y pro profit, right? Like they have to show their work. And in HR, we haven't really had to show our work in a meaningful way. But with that, we've lost a little credibility in our peer groups. Not that they don't think we do nothing. We, they know we do, and they know we're important, but we're not able to show how and why we're important.

Melissa Anzman (05:13): So let's focus on recruiting metrics, because again, these are easy for most of us to track. They're probably available to a lot of us. And if you have a applicant tracking system and ATS, you definitely have access to these numbers quite easily. And so let's start there. Now. The key to metrics is, as you learned in episode 31, you need to track metrics that matter for your company and your company. Only that being said, there are a few things that as we go through this series, I'm going to recommend at a minimum to be tracking. Now, if that metric does not matter for your organization, then don't track it. But if you're not sure where to start, if you are new to metrics, I don't want to just give you the answer of like, figure it out. I want to give you some real metrics for you to start with. All right. Sound good. I think it does. So let's get started.

Melissa Anzman (06:11): So the first one that I want to recommend to be tracking is the number of open requisitions or reqs per recruiter. Now this metric is going to show you how efficient your recruiting is and detect early on when you need a staff up or down. And when you need to have more resources to support your company's recruiting eackksffort, this can also identify easily areas that may have high turnover or special needs in getting candidates on board. Now I know right now in our current work environment, this is not something that we can really leverage too much. I mean, we've all felt the pain of COVID departments have been slashed, budgets have been cut all of those things. However, it's really important for us to track how many open recs there are per recruiter. So not only we can see the workload, but also we need to understand how efficient and effective the recruiting is.

Melissa Anzman (07:17): So if, is there a line in which we just absolutely can't get the right candidate for these really important, even if there's fewer roles, if we can't get that recruited for, because that recruiter is recruiting, you know, 50 reqs versus a typical 20 at that company. So we need to understand the number of reqs per recruiter. And then from that, we can also understand the efficiency and effectiveness. That's why that's so important. The second metric for talent, acquisition or recruiting is the time to fill for requisitions. So the time to fill metric is going to show you how long it takes from a position being needed to having someone accept an offer that is called the time to fill it. So basically how long it takes to walk through all 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 to help with anticipating needs for key positions.

Melissa Anzman (08:20): So nothing sits vacant to the detriment of the business. The other thing is, is your time to fill is going to identify where your recruiting and onboarding process as they come together and meet how they are doing for your overall employee experience, what gaps there are, what friction points there are, how effective it is and so on. So we obviously don't want these requisitions open for a long time. And right now it's an interesting thing. I've been seeing some both sides, the coin, frankly, I've had some companies have a really hard time closing that time to fill, which seems weird. There's a lot of people. Great, great, great people looking for work right now, but they haven't been able to close their time to fill number. And then I've seen people like make dramatics like strides forward at getting their time to feel really low because there's so much talent.

Melissa Anzman (09:20): So I think you just need to understand what those numbers are saying and what like how and why they're telling us that. And that's why this is such a great metric. So what you want to dig into is for the time to fail, you want to understand where is that getting stuck? Is it getting stuck in the preapproval process? Is it getting stuck in the requisitions? Are, is the sourcing person or the first screener not seeing enough resumes like, or is the interview process taking forever is a hiring manager taking forever. All those things. Your time to fill can show you a lot of different things along the way, but at a high level, track that metric. And you're going to get information about other things as part of that process as well. So the third metric for recruiting to track is the total number of hires.

Melissa Anzman (10:08): So this would be the total number of people you hire when it's within a specific timeframe. And that timeframe is completely up to you, whether it's by month, by quarter, by year. And this is going to help the business with workforce planning as you move forward and project growth rates for future timeframes. It's also going to show you the health of the organization and reflect the overall health of your culture. Now total number of hires really indicates how many people are coming on board. Now that the other item that you would want to consider, it's not a recommendation. It's a consideration here is how like what your net employee number is, which means how many new people are you bringing on board and how many people are leaving and understanding what that numbers, what that number would be. Now, the reason we want to track the total number of hires is really so that we can do workforce planning.

Melissa Anzman (11:09): Like that is truly the only thing that this number helps us with. It's not a, Oh great. We brought on 10 more people that doesn't give us a, any value. But what is valuable is over time, we are able to look at total number of hires either by month or by quarter or by year, right? So we should track them in all those ways to understand when we need to plan, as we plan ahead, when we need certain resources available to help with those things, whether it's, you know, Oh, this, this month seems very slow for us in a recruiting number. We're not gonna need that many recs open. So we're not going to need that many recruiters focused on, you know, whatever that is. So we can look at the numbers to then have our resources in the proper way. And that's what total number of hires helps us with.

Melissa Anzman (11:58): You didn't get into HR crunch numbers, but there's got to be some way for you to show the results of your hard work and figure out what's really working for your company and spatially right now, every HR professional today has to be able to identify what to track, how to quantify it and what to do with the results at better. We want HR pros to be able to leverage HR metrics, to do more great work for their people. Our goal is to help you track the right things in the right way, without relying on out of touch outsourcing or a one size fits all solution, HR metrics, one Oh one is designed to help you do just that it's a four week online course that introduces you to HR metrics, how to choose the right ones for you to track in your current role, how to turn numbers into stories and build a business case around what you discovered when you know your metrics. You can focus time on the work that matters by having a clear roadmap for your priorities. You can significantly increase your results across the board by boosting your efficiency and forgetting the days when you felt like you were throwing spaghetti against the wall. And you'll instantly raise your authority and profile at work and even more great opportunities will come your way to find out that HR metrics one Oh one can help you meet your goals and Excel in your role in HR text better two, four, four, two two, two.

Melissa Anzman (13:42): The next record, the next metric to track this as number four is diversity information. So tracking diversity information is not just something you have to do, but it is something that you should want to do. And with the pressure this year, this has been something that has been elevated into at least the culture here in the U S it has been something that we in HR have been working on, hopefully for years and years, but now we have to track this. Like, if you haven't been tracking this from a recruiting perspective, you have to do so going forward, having diversity in the workplace, whether that is diverse thought and experience and background and ethnicities and cultures and all those things, it fosters innovation. It fosters success, understanding where you are lacking diverse candidates and employees is going to help you break down any invisible and dangerous biases that may exist and help drive a better hiring practice program and also identify those training needs.

Melissa Anzman (14:50): So when we look at information from a recruiting standpoint, I'm going to leave the specifics up to what your company says is diverse and how you measure that. But I would say you need to understand how many people with diversity in their backgrounds. So again, diversity is not just color of skin or race or any of those things. It's also in background and education in culture and geography, like all those things are diverse. So I want you to understand what you are counting in your diverse conversations. Like also what's legal. Did you do that? Like we're not being, you know, crazy weird about it, but we want to make sure that we are elevating more diverse candidates, more diverse conversations, and helping our workforce learn more about that and work better with that. So we have to, if you're not already, we have to start tracking diverse information and understand where we need to be doing a better job in HR to help promote more diversity in the recruiting process, the next metric to track.

Melissa Anzman (15:58): These are two metrics I'm going to sort of put together and talk about in the same time, is the candidate and manage your satisfaction rates. So these two are a little bit of more subjective numbers, so to speak. They're not usually something that is tracked by your ATS or applicant tracking system, but these numbers are something that HR has to actively seek out and you're not doing it. And it's super easy to do so. So first let me talk about the importance of tracking these metrics. Based on these numbers, you are going to instantly be able to tell if your hiring practices are working and that you're selecting the right candidates for your company's culture and your employee experience. These are critical metrics for the long-term success of your company, your culture, and your at the end of the day, those turnover rates. So to start tracking these metrics, you're going to need to create two different surveys.

Melissa Anzman (17:00): You can do it through a super fancy company, but honestly you don't need to, you can do it through something like a survey monkey I type form, or my personal favorite Cognito forms. You'll create one survey for candidates, one survey for managers, and this survey should ask some questions that are similar for them. And of course you want to like update them to make sense versus candidate versus manager. But what we're trying to understand is their feelings and thoughts about the experience. So question number one would be, now that you're in the role, how is the position as it was described to you during the recruiting process? So with this question, what we're really trying to understand is did we hire you for the thing that we said we were going to hire you for? Did we, were we honest and truthful during the recruiting process?

Melissa Anzman (17:47): Did we have a good grip on what the job really should be, et cetera. And for the manager, what we want to understand is are they performing the role that they said they could perform in? So that's the flip side of the coin here. The next question is, are you satisfied that you accepted this position and satisfied is a hard word? I totally get it. We don't want to be like, are you glad the thing here is, is we want to understand either their experience about it. So we can ask an experience related question, subbing out satisfaction experience. But the, what we're trying to understand is are they regretting their decision? Are they in it to learn something? Are they really glad that they accepted it? And that it looked like exactly what they thought it would be. Have they walked in with the right expectation for the manager perspective?

Melissa Anzman (18:41): What we would say is, are you satisfied that with the candidate in this position, and what we're trying to understand from there is did you make a good choice? Are you happy with your choice? So to speak? The third question is, is the role that you accepted meeting your expectations. And this is truly that I got, what I signed up for. This is a, this is what I expected. This is what I'm doing. Thank you very much. We're on the same page. And for the manager, what you would ask is, is the candidate meeting your expectations, the last question, and again, you can add more of these are just for starting suggestions, which is, do you feel the company's culture or the employee experience was accurately described during the recruiting process? And the other side of that for the manager is do you feel like the candidate walked in understanding the company's culture?

Melissa Anzman (19:37): Now these four questions are your starter questions. You don't want a ton of questions in these, and you probably want to send them at 30 days and maybe at 90 days and at one 80 days, and you can change the questions out. And if you're saying that's a lot of surveying, send it at 30, send it at one 80. What we are trying to understand is where the gaps are in our recruiting process. Now I have a whole section in the employee experience solution book about the external employee experience. And this is where we're trying to find the gaps. This is the exact moment where we're trying to find how we present ourselves externally versus how our employees experience it internally. And it's so important because if there is a mismatch, if there is incorrect information, if there are friction points, if it's not at all, what we thought it would be, then that employee is not only having a negative employee experience, but they are ready to leave.

Melissa Anzman (20:38): And they're probably not helping people around them along the way. And so we need to understand this and also help us get better at our recruiting process, our external branding process throughout the recruiting process and so on. So here's for these questions. And for these interviews, you can definitely use like a Likert scale, which is that, you know, one through five or one through eight, depending how fancy you want to get. Umut I would always, like, I recommend for every single survey that you do leave room for comments, let people tell you more information in their own words as to how things are working out, what they're excited about and what they're not. The other thing that you can find out from these types of surveys is truly management gaps. So if your new employee is unhappy, but your manager's really happy, that can be a sign that that manager is checked out or doesn't realize they haven't given them the proper tools and so on.

Melissa Anzman (21:40): So this helps us not only in the recruiting process, but also having substantial numbers in understanding how our managers are doing at welcoming and onboarding new employees. So with these six suggested metrics for recruiting and talent acquisition, you are going to be able to provide more quantitative analysis for your onboarding and recruiting process. And this is that critical point when employees are joining your organization. And this is sort of as a come in. That's why we started there, or they're walking through the door with us. We want to show these metrics. So again, they're the number of open reqs per recruiter, time to fill for requisitions, total number of hires, diversity information, candidate satisfaction, and manager satisfaction. Using these metrics at a minimum to start, you are going to be able to add more objective measurements in the everyday work that you do as we bring new employees on board. Thank you so much for tuning in for this episode of the rethink HR podcast. For more information, including show notes and resources, please go to RethinkHRPodcast.com/32.