Tech Recruiting Metrics You Should Be Using

Innovation Tech Recruiting Metrics You Should Be Using David Moise Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Aug 9, 2022, 07:45am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin David is Technical Talent Director, and sometimes developer with Decide Consulting .

He helps companies develop Technical Talent Strategies. getty Tech skills are in high demand. Still, companies are underestimating how high that demand is.

One study says there will be a talent shortage of 85 million people by 2030 . The cybersecurity talent shortfall today is 2. 7 million people .

Companies that aim to solve talent gap issues are receiving huge amounts of venture capital. The value of tech companies is undisputed. As such, you need to get more out of your talent acquisition process.

What Gets Measured Gets Done When a company states they are measuring certain KPIs, the activity to meet those KPIs accumulates. Holding the talent acquisition team accountable to some KPIs is a good thing. A Google search will quickly lead you to some common, useful recruiting KPIs, including the following: • Time to hire.

• Manager satisfaction. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event • Candidates per source. • Candidate experience.

• Acceptance rate. • Cost per hire. Thoughtful KPIs improve the hiring process.

Many companies implement HR and recruiting metrics to measure how they are doing. Here are some lesser-known, but highly effective, KPIs to improve your talent acquisition process. Top Performer Origin Every company has its “A players.

” What is their story? How did they get that way? Do they share an educational background, previous employer, work experience, first manager or something else? The method for finding new “A players” could be sitting right under your nose. I helped a security audit company find new team members. They were looking for people with top cybersecurity certifications, like a CISSP.

They were frustrated because their budget for the role was under what someone with a CISSP can get. When we started asking them about their best employees, they were all network engineers who worked at small banks in smaller cities. They helped these individuals get their CISSP.

The employees took one to two years to get a CISSP and typically stayed on for one to two years after they got the certification. They were looking at the wrong profile for new employees. They recalibrated the search and brought in several good people.

Getting a high-producing employee for three to four years is a win. Assessment Take Rate We need to make sure the technical people we hire are qualified to do the work. It is hard to write quality SQL if you do not know the difference between a “WHERE” and “HAVING” clause.

An easy solution to qualify people is to have them take an online assessment. Here is the issue: Many people will not even take assessments. If you are a software developer and you change your LinkedIn status to “open to work,” recruiters are going to reach out to you.

If you post a resume somewhere, even more recruiters will reach out. Imagine being pursued by 10 companies. Five of them require you to take an online assessment.

Each assessment takes an hour. The other five just want to talk to you. Which opportunities are you going to follow up on? If you are a FAANG company (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), you can ask people to take 17 assessments and they will.

Your company probably does not have the clout of a FAANG. Track how many assessments you are asking people to take and how many get completed. Improve this by asking people to take the assessment later in the recruitment process.

The more invested in the company they are, the more likely they will invest time taking an assessment. Candidate Pipeline To Sales Pipeline For many tech companies, future staff size is directly tied to sales. If an MSP, consulting firm or software company with add-on services sells more, they need additional staff to work on these projects.

You’ve probably heard the following: “We just closed three deals. We need eight people to start on Monday. ” While this can never be completely avoided, there is a way to lessen the impact.

Companies with at least a midlevel sales process can measure the volume of the deal pipeline. This could be based on outstanding proposals, customer inquiries or even sales calls. There is a way to forecast next month’s sales from these numbers.

Smart companies will find a way to correlate the recruiting activity to the sales activity. Imagine a company historically closes 50% of its proposals. If proposals double in a month, the talent acquisition team needs to step up their outreach, job postings and candidate marketing.

Sales pipelines and talent pipelines need to be tightly coupled. Passive/Active Candidate Ratio Someone responding to a job posting is an active candidate. Someone responding to your LinkedIn outreach pitching a job is a passive candidate.

If your company has aggressive growth plans, you need both. It is easier to bring in active candidates. It takes much more outreach and marketing effort to convince that passive person to look at your company.

Most hiring managers in your company want to find those passive candidates. It is like the colloquialism “a dollar won is sweeter than the dollar earned. ” Attracting passive candidates requires concentrated marketing and multiple touchpoints.

All passive candidate campaigns begin with a draft board and grow from there. The talent acquisition team needs to have a plan to sell the company to these candidates. The same tools used by the sales and marketing team can be used on candidates.

There are many good recruiting and talent acquisition metrics to use. Start with some simple metrics and add more metrics that suit your company. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.

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