We all know that “what gets measured gets managed.” As a manager, it’s up to you to measure—and manage—one of your most important responsibilities: Hiring.
Talented people are like oxygen to your team. And a sizable chunk of the manager’s value is the ability to bring in more talented people.
Unfortunately, many managers don’t know how to attract and hire great people. One telltale sign of a manager who’s weak in this area is a poor hiring process.
Top Talent Won’t Put Up with a Poor Hiring Process
The people you most need to get on your team are top performers in the market. They usually have multiple opportunities, and they’re looking for your company to show why it’s worth working for.
If you have a slow, broken-down hiring process, most talented people are going to cross you off their list.
The 5 Metrics I Recommend Tracking
Learning the art of hiring and recruiting is a career-long process, but start by making sure you’re tracking (and improving) these five metrics:
- Time to fill an open job.If open positions sit around unfilled, productivity suffers and stellar people will be less interested in what now looks like a stale opportunity.
If it’s taking multiple months to fill positions, take a hard look at your hiring process, particularly whether you’re offering a compelling employee value proposition.
- Time from engaging candidate to offer. In-demand candidates don’t have time to wait around for you to get them an offer. Set a goal to hand your top candidate an offer within two weeks of first engaging with them.
That may not be possible for all positions, but if candidates are languishing for months without news on the position, they’ll move on.
- Percentage of candidates who accept offers. Hiring is a very time-consuming process, so it is important not to waste everyone’s time going through the interviewing process just to have the candidate turn down the offer.
If you—and perhaps a recruiter—are laying the groundwork for an offer from the get-go and properly selling the company to the candidate, this number should be 80 percent or better.
- Companies candidates choose over yours. It’s one thing if you lose out on potential employees to other high-flying companies, but if you are losing to Joe’s Shoe Emporium, something about your company is not very attractive.
In one company where I served as CEO, we lost the number-one graduate in computer science from the University of Texas to Google. While I never like losing, the fact that it came down to deciding between us and Google convinced me we were doing something right.
- Percentage of new hires with high ratings two quarters after hire. I recommend that managers use an A-B-C rating system for (confidentially) evaluating employees, but whatever system you use, make sure that you keep track of how many employees receive high ratings six months after hire.
If you’re bringing on a good amount of people who are C-level players after 6–9 months, you’ll need to evaluate where the breakdown is happening.
Track and regularly review these metrics to understand how well you’re doing at the hiring part of your job. It’s time well spent, no matter what industry you’re in.
