A Matter of Metrics – Measuring for Success in Recruitment

Marvin Smith, strategic talent sourcing and talent community strategist at Lockheed Martin, led an interactive webinar on “A Matter of Metrics - Measuring for Success” March 6 with ERE and we have a recap for you here.

What does success look like in digital era recruitment? We live in a hyper era: hyper-competition, hyper-speed, hyper-volatility, and at times…hypertensive. Do the traditional models of views, clicks, speed, cost, quality, diversity, hires, and retention still reflect the best measurements of success? Or do we need a new approach that measures what matters most?

In today’s talent marketplace, competition doesn’t look the way it used to. Our competitors are industry-diverse, especially in tech. At Lockheed Martin, we’re seeing that our competitors include Apple and Microsoft. They are large companies that are hiring tech talent. We face volatility and we must now take in huge amounts of information in order to stay on top of what’s current in our careers. Time is in short supply. Today we’re going to talk about measuring what matters most, which should help streamline reporting and the way we look at success in our recruiting strategy.

The difference between Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and Metric:

• KPI is strategy - engage the target talent demographic at each stage of job seeker status.
• Metric is a tactic - measure the activities that support the engagement of talent.

A significant percentage of our target demographic is either passive job seeker, casual job seeker, or actively looking - 82% of the labor market open to opportunities. So how do we engage each type of job seeker?

The active marketplace - inbound recruiting or recruitment marketing

Advertising used to attract people to your company. Talent sourcing or outbound recruiting has been around for some time but also includes the outside of the box methods to attract talent. And employee referrals turn your employees into evangelists for your company.

For passive job seekers - we have to use outbound recruiting.

Relationship models: Managing candidate relationships is an ongoing strategy and has much better success than the older “one and done” recruiting methods.

As recruiters, we have two customers: The hiring manager and the consumer (candidate). There are different metrics to focus on for both.

Hiring manager success metrics:

• Quality of skills
• Performance
• Retention
• Time to close
• Ramp time

Candidate (prospect) success metrics:

• Work-life balance
• Professional growth
• Compensation
• Smart people/team
• Company culture
• Tech stack

Job (employee) success metrics:

• The type of work
• Company culture
• Hiring manager’s management style
• Potential career paths
• Characteristics of success

We have to provide more and more information to our target audiences. I was impressed with the Talroo’s blog and the quality of information, including recruiting metrics like the ones we’re talking about today.

How do we take a relationship building process and manage it with metrics?

First, consider your tech stack: CRM, employee referral platform, recruitment marketing platform, talent community platform, ATS. And, we use a CRM for outbound campaigns, but also to nurture candidates.

Talent mapping

• Explore: where are our candidates, where can we find them, when will they be receptive.
• Discover: contact information
• Engage: how do we craft a targeted message and what motivates these candidates.
• Convert: move from candidate to applicant (or prospect to candidate)
• Screening: automated inbound marketing
• Employee referral: high-touch internal referrals
• Nurturing: builds longer term relationships and in recruitment marketing, we use content marketing to do that.
• Pipelines: are segmented populations of the people we’re building these relationships with.
• Communities: designed for professionals in these segments.
• Alerts: these can be a valuable source of external hire. Great way to bring people from passive to active status.
• Repeat: all of the above in the cycle.

The candidate journey really begins with engagement. This is where we begin to build these relationships.

How we measure what matters most:

Using the example of email:

• Strategy - engage and target talent that is actively or passively looking for a job using outbound recruiting.
• Tactic - engage a target audience with email outreach that is relevant to them.
• Metrics - measure size of target audience, email engagement metrics, and interview metrics.

When you map the talent: talent pool size, percentage of talent pool identified, percentage of talent pool with contact information.

Email metrics - what matters most:

• Emails arrived
• Emails bounced
• Emails marked spam
• Emails opened/read
• Email CTA (clicked to action)
• Email drip campaign (AB testing with multiple messages)
• Screening interview metrics
• Personal interview metrics
• Hire metrics
• Onboarding metrics

Measuring metrics is critical to all your efforts and is especially important in digital recruitment. Metrics offer you a way to understand the successes and failures you encounter as well of those by your competition. Developing a recruiting and leadership culture that is metrics-focused doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort to establish baselines, evaluate data, and establish mechanisms to measure the data as a first, best step.