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Every staffing firm has a veritable treasure trove of valuable information with the power to transform its business—staffing data. For various reasons—competing priorities, a lack of reporting capabilities, or the reporting intimidation factor—many firms don’t harness this data. Specifically, many useful and valuable staffing metrics go entirely unreported.
What do staffing firms track? Gross margin and customer satisfaction—staffing pros rank these two metrics as the most important indicators of business health and performance, respectively. But many other great metrics can be important indicators of your business’ performance, profitability, and future. Here are three staffing metrics you may not be tracking but should.
Candidate Satisfaction
If you read anything about the staffing industry (including this blog), you’ve probably read your fair share about the candidate experience. It feels like it’s all anyone can talk about, so surely staffing firms measure candidate satisfaction? After all, how can you accurately gauge the quality of your candidate experience if you’re not doing anything to measure it?
As you have probably predicted by its inclusion on this blog, a large percentage of staffing firms do not measure candidate satisfaction. A whopping 2 out of 5 staffing pros say their firm doesn’t measure it regularly.
And that’s perhaps the reason for the disconnect between candidates and recruiters. Ninety-three percent of staffing professionals say the candidate experience they provide is good or excellent, while candidates often tell a very different story. For example, only 47 percent of candidates said they felt communication was consistent throughout their hiring process, according to CareerBuilder’s recent study.
Candidate satisfaction isn’t just about measuring the results, however. You can use your ATS/CRM data to proactively make changes to your process and ensure a higher rate of satisfied candidates. Check out this blog for ways to use your data to support your candidate engagement goals.
Time-to-Fill
Time-to-fill (the number of days a job is available and unfilled) is a super useful metric for measuring your recruiters’ speed and efficiency. A poor time-to-fill rate could suggest potentially serious operational efficiencies that could be costing your firm money.
Besides being an indicator of performance, time-to-fill is useful in other ways. It can help you set accurate expectations with a client when setting a time-frame for a placement. Clients cite poor communication as one of their biggest pet peeves, so providing them with an accurate placement prediction can go a long way into being transparent and reliable in the eyes of your clients. You may also want to use-time-to-fill to inform your budget planning and resource allocation.
Yet, despite its usefulness, staffing professionals report little use of the metric. If you want a leg up on the competition, start tracking it now!
Ratios
This last one is a cheat: staffing ratios refer not to a single metric but a whole category of metrics. Ratios are a way of tracking two data sets in relation to one another—for example, the ratio of interviews to placements.
This is critical for staffing firms because a candidate placement is the result of a long chain of actions. If any link in the chain is weak, it severely impacts the outcome. Ratios allow you to analyze every stage of the process to determine any potential inefficiencies.
The five metrics below all represent a fundamental stage in an eventual candidate placement. Track the relationship between each of the metrics to discover if there’s an unusual drop-off between any two stages.
- Client Submission Count
- Internal Submission Count
- Job Count
- Interview Count
- Placement Count
Start building smarter reports that will take your firm to the next level! Check out the new ebook, From Reporting Zero to Staffing Hero: How to Build Reports to Better Run Your Business, for an in-depth exploration of these three reporting questions and the ways they can inform a better reporting strategy.
