Recruitment Metrics for fast-growing startups

Talking to any founder will make you realize they need good employees, and they needed them yesterday.

Even startups with developed recruitment strategies and a good recruitment process can easily have problems scaling teams necessary for sales or a growing customer portfolio. The challenge here is to constantly scan the environment where recruitment happens and quickly make adjustments, essential to support the overall business goals.

The environment in this context means internal and external factors that affect the necessary talent supply. HR Partners should work with founders to set goals and measurable metrics from the start.

The following metrics offer the opportunity to monitor and implement impactful changes to your recruitment strategy early on.

Quality of Source

Not all sources of candidates are equally good. Some sources are more efficient or have a better return on investment.

In practice, this can mean you managed to hire top performers from this source or have successful hires from a lower number of candidates.

Most likely, for a high-growth organization, it makes sense to look at the quality of source in a shorter time frame, a quarter or a year.

Once you understand how your candidate sources rank, you can increase the budget or resources targeting that specific source.

Proactive vs Sourced candidates

Related to candidate sources, it's essential to understand the ratio between candidates that apply to candidates that your team sources.

Early on, every startup struggles with brand recognition and employer branding. Although employer branding should be part of your overall recruitment strategy, it takes some time to generate enough data and understand the current ratio of candidates and how well your EB efforts are paying off.

The same metric will also shed light on the effectiveness of your sourcing team, and if you need to adjust resources.

Candidate Satisfaction

Following up with candidates currently in the recruitment process will get you fresh feedback on their experience.

A scaling company in a competitive market needs to have a great candidate experience early on. Most likely, you are not dealing with enough candidates to fill all the roles quickly, so everyone counts. On top of making the process effective and positive for everyone involved, these insights will tell you how well the recruitment process reflects your company culture.

Quality of hire

Once hired, we want our new employees to succeed and stay with the company. Quality of hire measured how many good hires (or bad hires) the team made.

Before tracking this metric, founders and HR teams should decide what a bad hire is for their company. Most often, a bad hire would be someone who leaves in the first six months or does not meet the productivity goals set by his manager.

Depending on the time frame you assess new employees for. The Quality of hire metric will show you how well your overall recruitment process works. After a while, you will be able to use trend analysis to see how your adjustment in the recruitment process affects hire quality.

Offer Acceptance Rate

All recruitment efforts effectively come together in the offer stage of your process. The offer acceptance rate is easily calculated, but the results should significantly influence your recruitment strategy.

The metric will give you insights into how many candidates you wanted, liked the company, and your offer enough to say yes.

It sounds simple, but it is not. Offers are connected to your company culture, candidate experience, salary, benefits, employer brand, job descriptions, competitiveness, and more.

Your recruitment team should follow up with every candidate you offered a job to and understand what made them say yes or no. Insights from this should be addressed immediately.

Conclusion

These metrics are important to any organization. Arguably tackling them early on will have a higher impact on a startup. Founders and their HR partners need to make sure their recruitment efforts are effective and their decisions data-driven.

Pressure to hire can lead to an ad-hoc approach to hiring. Partnering with HR early on, following these metrics, and actively implementing changes will reduce bad hires, save time and increase chances for effective scaling.