5 Metrics Savvy HR Professionals are Tracking.

As mentioned in our HR Manifesto, metrics are great, but meaningless in isolation. They need to be placed in trends over time, in context of competitors or relative to business goals. Ideally all three. So if you are starting to track numbers fresh, bear in mind you may not have meaningful information to deliver back to a wider stakeholder group for a period of months.

Here are five data points that we have seen clients effectively leverage to drive stakeholder buy-in or to demonstrate their own professional impact. Some you might already be tracking, but could perhaps relook at how you’re packaging them to deliver business insight, others might be entirely new.

A quick and easy top-line metric that you can pull from your LinkedIn company page that indicates the impact of a campaign effort or general trends over time. You can also immediately see this in context of competitors to give you a sense of what kind of growth you should be targeting. Also, with a little digging, this metric will reveal what social strategies are driving the greatest engagement in your sector.

There’s a ton of stats out there highlighting the ROI of a strong internal referral culture so most exec teams know it’s an area they need to start investing in. What they might not know is awareness and recall on job openings internally has been shown to be as important, if not more-so, as incentives. Knowing this, if I was on an internal comms team I would make it my business to build a bridge between this data point and my teams’ activities. If you can move the needle on this one, and get the credit for it, you are quite justified on a budget ask.

Your channel demographics are an indicator of the audiences you currently have reach with. What are the characteristics of your current demographics? And do they match your current and predicted hiring needs? Whatever career channels your brand operates on you should be able to pull a quick report of your engaged audiences. If this does not match up with your desired candidate profiles you have a brand gap.

A killer stat, equivalent to cost per sale in general marketing and the north star of recruitment marketing. Keep track of the time and resources that go into your internal and external recruitment activities and divide by the number of hires over a given period of time. You can go deep and broad with this metric, splitting out by business unit and team, channel and messaging, but importantly how it breaks down will inform you on what is the most efficient use of recruitment resources. This is one of the most impactful metrics used to back a proposal to shift resources.

Click to view, click to apply, applicant to interview, interview to hire. Comparing the various conversion rates along your conversion funnel will start painting a picture of where your funnel is succeeding and failing. If you are driving audiences en mass to your career site but aren’t getting the applicants you might need to reconsider your web experience. Likewise, if you’re sending a solid volume of candidates to interviews, but can’t get them over the line, perhaps you need to start investing in your post-interview experience. Funnel ratios should indicate a pretty clear priority list.

These are but a few of the numbers that can be used to drive employer comms strategies and back proposals. As with commercial marketing and branding, there is a huge array of data points to choose from, but a good rule of thumb when starting out is to be selective. Focusing on the metrics that lend themselves to the most pertinent business outcome will earn you your quick wins without drowning you or your bored colleagues in numbers, which is very easy to do.

Have some questions around what numbers make the most sense to your business needs? Get in touch, we love nothing more than setting K.P.I.’s!!