It seems like hiring new people is a task almost all modern companies struggle with. Whether it’s finding the right people or hiring at the right time, companies can’t seem to get the hang of it. As Forbes reports, research shows that almost half of new hires fail within 18 months.

We’re not just talking about small and medium-sized companies. Huge corporations like MasterCard, IBM, and Microsoft have all experienced the same problem. Whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s time for your recruitment strategy to be re-assessed thoroughly.

How to Assess Your Recruitment Strategy

Do you know what your recruitment strategy looks like? How many people handle the ordeal? Are you personally involved in the process? If you're anything like your fellow business owners, you probably aren’t all that involved in the recruitment strategy.

Recent research shows that as many as 40% of companies in the US outsource their recruitment programs completely. In some cases, a 3rd-party company will conduct in-person interviews with recruits, in other, everything is done online. This could be completely the wrong approach!

The fact that so many people feel comfortable having an outside party handling one of the most important aspects of any business is troubling. Seeing how a lack of skilled and talented workers is the number one concern for chief executives doesn’t make things any easier to understand.

First off, if you want your business to have a future, you need to be more involved in the recruitment process. Secondly, you need to know how to measure success, to see which tactic works the best. 

Today, we’re going to look at two of the most commonly used recruitment performance metrics. Let’s see which one of them will help you find the right people.

What Exactly Is ‘Time to Hire’?

At first glance, time to hire doesn’t seem like a logical metric. What does the time you take to hire someone to have to do with you being able to find the right talent? In short, the top talent won’t spend too much time on the unemployment market. If you want to hire the cream of the cream people, you need to be as quick as possible.

1. Why Do You Need It?

It measures the efficiency of your recruitment team and assesses the quality of their tactics. The quicker you hire the right people, the more competitive you remain. Around 50% of recruiters measure time to hire, in contrast to the quality of hire, which is measured by only around 36% of recruiters.

2. What Area Does It Lack In?

Hiring a new worker is a complicated process. Depending on the position you’re trying to fill, the number of people you need at the time, recruitment tools you use, and many other factors, hiring someone can take between four days and four months. For example, SMS recruitment tools allow you to communicate a way more effectively with applicants.

What Exactly Is ‘Quality of Hire’?

This metric is pretty self-explanatory: it measures the quality of work the hire puts, their impact on your business, and your workers’ satisfaction with the hire, to name a few. In short, it measures how much is the employee worth and how much impact they have on your company as a whole.

1. Why Do You Need It?

When it comes to hiring new people, quality tops any other metric out there because of one reason: a bad hire can cost you a lot. Studies have shown that a poor hiring decision can have powerful consequences on costs. 

2. What Area Does It Lack In?

The metric, while useful when calculated right, it’s pretty hard to get right. A lot of personal opinion goes into calculating the quality of hire. Roughly half of companies use performance reviews to measure it, and as we know, these reviews can be extremely biased in certain situations.

Final Verdict

So which one of these is more important? It depends. Overall, in our opinion, the quality of hire is a much more important metric. It will help you understand the effectiveness of your entire hiring process and even allow you to see how your HR team functions. 

Plus, the metric also allows you to see how much return on investment you get from every new hire. Down the line, all of this can help you tweak the hiring process, see how much time and money you need to spend on hiring new people, and plan out your overall business strategy more carefully.

Remember, you can always place your job advert on StudentJob so you find the right audience for your positions!