Monday, January 18, 2010

Building a better recruiting metric?

How do you measure a good recruiter? Metrics of course, but really are the metrics we use that accurate in determaining how your recruiting team actually perfoming? Probably not, most of the metrics I've seen or talked to people about tend to be things like : Time to fill, Cost per hire, Acceptance Rate, Number of hires, Source, etc etc. Some of these are GREAT metrics but can't we do better? I feel like these metrics have been around forever with very little innovation or change.

So, let's dig a little deeper and see if we can find a few better metrics based on the Sabermetrics that they use in baseball. Wikipedia says the following:

"Sabermetricians frequently call into question traditional measures of baseball skill. For instance, batting average is generally considered by them to be a statistic of limited usefulness because it turns out to be a poor predictor of a team's ability to score runs.[2] A more typical sabermetric reasoning would say that runs win ballgames, and that therefore a good measure of a player's worth is his ability to help his team score more runs than the opposing team. In particular, they tend to emphasize on base percentage."

Ok, so let's think about "recruiting skill" by questioning some traditional recruiting statistics. Let's start with number of hires. You have two recruiters, Recruiter A hires 10 engineers while Recruiter B hires 7 over the same time period. Traditional recruiting metrics would say Recruiter A is the stronger performer. Now, in some ways, number of hires is the most important metric however, if dig deeper there may be more to the story.

If we cross-reference the performance rating of each hire, there may be a different picture. Assuming we rate employees on a 1-5 scale, the average performance of Recruiter A's hires is 3.5 while Recruiter B's folks perform at an average rating of 4.5. You metrics would know look like this:

Number of HiresAverage Performance Score
Recruiter A103.5
Recruiter B74.5

Now multiply the average score by the number of hires we come up with a statistic we'll call "Total Performance Score", which isl basically measuring not only how many hires your recruiter had, but what kind of a performance impact those hires actually had. The metrics would now be:

Number of HiresAverage Performance Score Total Performance Score
Recruiter A103.535.0
Recruiter B74.531.5

Does these metrics tell you anything? Well yes, Recruiter A hires more people but Recruiter B hires better performers. But there is more here. Recruiter A's scored a 35 out of a possible score of 50 while Recruiter B scored a 31.5 our of 35. So the performance difference is even more profound. Doing the math here we come up with a statistic we'll call "Hire Impact Ratio".

Number of HiresAverage Performance ScoreTotal Performance ScoreHire Impact Ratio
Recruiter A103.535.0.70
Recruiter B74.531.5.90

This "Hire Impact Ratio" shows us that Recruiter B hires candidates who have a much bigger impact within the company than Recruiter A. Does this matter? Sure it does! The goal of every recruiting organization is to hire the best people possible! I'm not saying this metric above is the greatest thing ever, but I am sure that we as recruiters can and should do a better job of finding ways to measure our performance than the same old metrics of the past! Thoughts?

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Pushing Forward Back...

Those of you who know my musical taste may recognize the tune I'm referencing for this post. (See Temple of the Dog for more). Anyway, as my first blog of 2010 I thought I'd take a quick minute to give thanks for some great moments in 2009 and queue up a few things for us all to look forward to in 2010!


- We should all be thankful that although the economy has been pretty bad, it didn't take quite as badly as many experts expected. It's still tough out there, but all signs seem to indicate we avoided the Great Depression II (I hope!)
- I'm thankful for Twitter, I've been able to meet a bunch of new folks from around the world who share their expertise and experience. If you don't tweet yet, you should!

- I'm thankful for my friends and family, another year of health and prosperity, hopefully this continues into 2010.

- Finally, thanks to all my readers, I'm still a pretty novice blogger but am hopeful I can really contribute something in 2010.


- Social Recruiting is the future? We'll see, I think the future is now

- Shout out to the team a Google, great bunch of folks and looks like 2010 will be the best yet

- Is 2010 the year that the Boston/Cambridge market REALLY comes back? I think so, between the VC activity and large software shops building out in town and honestly think the next decade will result in the rebirth of the tech market locally.

- I'm personally planning on being much more active this year in the local community, blogging, networking, etc.............

Good luck and Happy New Year everyone.............hope 2010 lives up to the hype!