Scenario
You are an HR leader and want to measure the productivity of your talent acquisition (TA) team for three reasons. One… you’re looking to create KPIs for your team’s goals as the organization overall is becoming more data focused. Two… you want to create consistent practices and SOPs for the team. Three… a metric will help provide realistic expectations to hiring managers for when their need will be filled. Setting realistic expectations with business leaders will improve your team’s customer service, ease frustrations, and build stronger relationships. All are important aspects of being the valued, strategic business partner HR needs to be.
HR metric solution: Time to Fill
Time to fill is the number of days it takes for an open position to be filled. The starting point for the timeframe can be at a couple different moments within the beginning of your recruitment process. It can be once the manager notifies you of the need and the requisition is submitted. Alternatively, it could be once the job opening is approved or when it is posted to your job boards and ready to accept applicants. The timeframe then ends once a candidate accepts the offer.
How to calculate
If you’re a lucky HR leader, this metric won’t be hard to calculate. You will simply access the reporting tool within your ATS, input the time period you want to be included in the data set, and export this number. If you’re especially lucky, you have an HR dashboard to calculate this metric as well.
If not, you may have to pull a couple data sets and make some calculations. For example, let’s say you decided the parameters of your time to fill metric will be from when the open opportunity is approved by the final approver to when a candidate signs the offer letter. Additionally, you want it the look back period to be from the last 12 months. The data points needed to calculate the HR metric will be the date when the opportunity is approved and the date the candidate signs the offer letter. You will then calculate the number of days between the two dates for each job opening from the past twelve months. The last step will be to find the average for each team member.
Analyzing the data to find a solution
Once the metrics are produced, it’s time to analyze (remember, there’s no point to metrics if you’re not following up with HR analytics). First, look at the averages overall and find patterns or differences. Are any of them clustering together or vary greatly from team member to team member? Are there any extreme outliers, like a team member with an extremely high or low time to fill? Finding the answers will give you a good starting place to dive deeper into the productivity and process of your TA team.
It will be beneficial to do some research and find the average time to fill for the industry, geographic location, and job level. It may take longer to fill a specialized role like a VP of software solutions versus a customer service rep. You can then use that information with your team’s averages for benchmarking to create your KPIs.
HR metrics can be the solution you need for your HR problems. Click here to sign up for a free demo of our automated HR dashboard. Let us do the calculations so you can skip straight to the analytics.
