Numbers are just numbers, unless you give them the right meaning, learn from them and connect smart actions to them. In many recruitment (marketing) tools you will find dashboards with data, but what are you looking at? Which KPIs are most important? And how do you deploy these KPIs to increase your success? In this blog, you'll find 15 essential KPIs that make it easy to measure RMA success.
An overview of recruitment marketing KPIs
There are tons of valuable KPIs that can give you great insights and help you optimize your recruitment strategy. In this blog we list 15 important KPIs for measuring recruitment marketing success.
- CPM
- CTR
- CPC
- Conversion
- Cost per lead
- Cost per acquisition
- Channel effectiveness
- Quality of applicants
- Interviews per hire
- Application-hire ratio
- Candidate NPS
- Number of vacancies per FTE
- Time to interview
- Time to fill
- Cost per hire
Read on quickly to see how to calculate these KPIs and what information the KPI gives you.
KPIs for recruitment campaigns
The first stage in recruitment is to attract talent and you do that with recruitment campaigns. To measure the effectiveness of your recruitment campaigns and compare channels and campaigns, pay attention to the following data.
1. Cost per mille (CPM).
With awareness campaigns, you want above all to reach your target audience, and to check how successful you are at this, you check the cost per mille. (CPM)
CPM = (number of views / 1,000) / ad budget spent
Looking only at the number of views or the reach of a campaign makes little sense, because it depends very much on the ad budget you have used to achieve those impressions. The more budget, the higher the reach - generally speaking. By comparing the number of views against the cost, you can properly compare campaigns and channels.
2. Click through rate (CTR).
With job campaigns, you focus on the clicks to your work-at-home site. Of course, you want those to be as high as possible. Therefore it is useful to see how many people actually click through after seeing your ad. You measure that with the CTR.
CTR = number of clicks to landing page / number of views x 100%
By the way, the CTR is not uninteresting for awareness campaigns either. After all, with visibility campaigns you not only want to reach people, but preferably also enthuse them. A click on your ad is an indication that people find the content attractive and thus says something about the extent to which you enthuse your target group. Not a bad KPI to include in employer branding campaigns.
3. Cost per click (CPC).
Perhaps your CTR on channel A is much higher than on channel B, but those clicks on channel A cost more than on channel B. To see which channel is getting the most clicks for your money, measure the cost per click. (CPC)
CPC = ad budget spent / number of clicks
The lower your CPC, the more clicks you can achieve with your budget. So don't stare blindly at the CTR, but also check the CPC of recruitment campaigns.
Conversion-related KPIs
Reach and clicks are nice, but candidates, that's what really matters. That's what you use recruitment marketing automation for. Therefore, you can't do without these conversion-related KPIs.
4. Conversion
With conversion, you measure what proportion of your website visitors actually take action, such as applying for a job.
Conversion on your work-by site = number of people responding / number of visits to your work-by site x 100%.
Because only a small portion of the workforce is actively seeking work and willingness to engage in a traditional application process is very low, we see shockingly low conversion rates of 1% to 3% on many work-by sites. To turn this tide, you can use soft conversions. These are low-threshold actions a visitor can take on your website, such as creating a job alert, starting a WhatsApp conversation or filling out a 'Call me form'. By doing so, you make taking action much faster, easier and more non-committal, and more candidates will make the first contact. Thus, lead generation tooling is a true conversion booster!
By the way, you can also measure the conversions from communication tools other than your work-at-home site. Think of the conversion from a Meta campaign or a job posting on a job board. You then calculate the number of people who respond as a percentage of the number of views of your Meta ad or the vacancy page on the job board. This allows you to properly compare different communication channels.
5. Cost per lead
Again, the more budget you allocate to recruitment marketing, the more likely potential candidates (leads) will sign up through a chat pop-up on your site, ads with lead forms or WhatsApp ads. Still, to understand spending versus revenue, keep an eye on the cost per lead.
Cost per lead = ad budget spent / number of leads
6. Cost per acquisition (CPA).
For the same reason as cost per lead, you measure cost per acquisition (CPA), or cost per job application. The lower your CPA, the more effective your recruitment marketing actions are.
CPA = ad budget spent / number of applications
7. KPIs for channel effectiveness
Social media campaigns, job boards, your work-at-home site, sourcing, Google ads. You probably deploy it all to attract candidates. But which channel performs best? By measuring channel effectiveness, you can see this immediately.
Channel effectiveness = number of qualified candidates from a specific channel / total number of qualified candidates
In addition, you can very well use all the KPIs mentioned above to compare channels with each other. This way you can discover that channel A might have a low CPC, but that the conversion from this channel lags tremendously and therefore the CPA is ultimately much higher than from other channels. Based on insights like these, you can allocate your budget optimally between marketing channels.
Finally, channel effectiveness can be a very interesting one if you put it in proportion to the time you spend using that particular channel. Suppose a recruiter spends one day per week on sourcing and gets 10 candidates per month from this. That same recruiter needs 2 hours per week to perform social advertising and from this comes 14 candidates per month. A quick calculation shows that social advertising is proportionately much more effective than sourcing.
Channel effectiveness (time-based) = number of qualified candidates from a specific channel per period / time required in hours to this specific channel per period
KPIs for response quality
It's not just about how many candidates your recruitment marketing produces; the quality of the responses is just as important. If 90% of the applicants do not make it through the first selection, then handling these responses is mostly time consuming and yields little. By being keen on KPIs aimed at measuring the quality of responses, you avoid this.
8. Quality of applicants
To measure the quality of candidate responses, you can look at the number of candidates that make it through the initial selection and compare this to the number of candidates overall. This gives you a good idea of whether the candidates you attract score well on the hard selection criteria, such as education, certification or work experience.
Quality of applicants = number of applicants who pass the initial screening / total number of applicants x 100%
9. Interviews per hire
Conducting interviews with candidates is essential to the recruitment process, but at the same time it is very time-consuming for recruiters, hiring managers and candidates. If you need very many interviews to fill a vacancy, it may indicate a relatively high number of non-quality responses.
Interviews per hire = number of interviews conducted with candidates / number of hires
With a strong employer branding strategy and the use of recruitment marketing automation, you increase the quality of applicants, because candidates know you as an employer, feel connected to it and apply from intrinsic motivation. This way, you naturally attract the right people to your organization.
You can calculate the interviews per hire ratio for various departments or locations to discover differences between them and make improvements where needed.
10. Application-hire ratio
As with interviews per hire, the applicant-hire ratio gives an indication of the quality of applicants. If you have to reject many applicants, chances are you are not reaching or enthusing your target audience specifically enough. If there are many candidates who drop out during the process itself, that is a sign that the follow-up is too slow or the candidate journey has not been set up properly. Ideally, then, this ratio should be as low as possible.
Application-hire ratio = number of applications / number of hires
KPI for the candidate experience
11. Candidate NPS
A positive candidate experience is hugely important to your recruitment success now and in the future. Candidates who have a pleasant experience applying for a job and the entire process that follows are more likely to be hired than candidates who find it takes too long, feel unequally treated or experience an impersonal approach. And the latter group, they are much more likely to talk about their negative experience than the positive group. That has its effect on your employer image and therefore on your ability to attract staff.
To measure the candidate experience, you can use the NPS method. (Net Promoter Score) Instead of asking customers if they would recommend you, now ask candidates and in context as an employer. From that rolls your Candidate NPS!
Candidate NPS = percentage of promoters - percentage of detractors
With recruitment marketing automation, you can improve the candidate experience in several ways. With lead generation you make your organization approachable and the process feels more equal, thanks to automations you can speed up the follow-up and recruiters save a lot of time on routine tasks and can therefore pay more attention to candidates.
KPI to measure productivity
12. Number of vacancies per fte in recruitment team
You use recruitment marketing automation to reach the right audience, increase conversion, improve the candidate experience and leverage your talent pools, but certainly also to save time among recruiters and recruitment marketers. Because the software takes over a lot of work from the team, you can handle more job postings and recruitment campaigns with smaller teams. For insight into the productivity improvements realized by deploying RMA software, look at the number of jobs per FTE in your recruitment team. Compare the result with the previous situation (when you were not yet using RMA software) to have a realistic estimate of the productivity improvement.
Recruitment team productivity = number of vacancies pending / number of FTEs working on these vacancies (recruiters and recruitment marketers)
Overall KPIs
In the end, it's all about two things: time and money. With the following KPIs, you measure what RMA software ultimately - at the bottom of the line - gets you.
13. Time to interview
This is the time it takes you to get to an initial interview with a candidate. The shorter this is, the better you know how to attract the right candidates. So it says something about the effectiveness of your recruitment marketing and the efficiency in the process.
Time to interview = the number of days from job posting to first interview
14. Time to fill
The time to fill indicates how many days it takes from job posting to acceptance of a hiring proposal. This KPI also gives an indication of your ability to attract candidates, engage them and provide a positive candidate journey.
Time to fill = the number of days from job posting to acceptance of a hiring proposal
This KPI is frequently confused with time to hire, but the two have an important difference. With the time to fill you start counting from the start of recruitment and with time to hire you look at the period between an application and the acceptance of a proposal. Thus, time to hire says something primarily about the application process, while time to fill also measures how quickly you attract candidates.
15. Cost per hire
Last but not least: the cost per hire. Ultimately, you want to fill as many vacancies as possible with good candidates at the lowest possible cost. Recruitment budgets are not infinite and also for recruitment agencies the cost per hire is relevant, because the lower the costs, the higher the margin.
Cost per hire = total recruitment cost / number of hires
Include both the direct costs of recruitment - such as media budgets, H&S fees, recruitment software licenses - and the indirect costs associated with recruitment. Consider the hours and labor costs required of recruiters and recruitment marketers.
Bonus for recruitment agencies
As a recruitment agency, there are 2 more KPIs you want to keep an eye on:
- Fill ratio = the number of jobs for which you realize placements / the number of jobs you hire x 100%.
- Replacement ratio = the number of candidates you place again after an initial placement / the total number of candidates placed x 100%
These KPIs give you insight into the success of your entire recruitment strategy and show you whether you are making smart use of talent pools.
Starting small
If you want to keep it simple and clear, start with these 5 KPIs:
- Conversion
- Application-hire ratio
- Candidate NPS
- Time to fill
- Cost per hire
Then you can continually expand your dashboarding and gather more valuable insights so that you are turning the right buttons to get the best results.
Measure, evaluate and adjust
At the end of the day, atural is not about measuring numbers, but about transitioning from numbers to insights and improvements. Use these KPIs to compare recruiting methods and channels and chart changes over time. By analyzing and adjusting periodically, recruiting becomes faster, easier and more affordable! In many recruitment (marketing) tools you will find dashboards with data, but what are you looking at? Which KPIs are most important? And how do you deploy these KPIs to increase your success? In this blog, you'll find 15 essential KPIs that make it easy to measure RMA success.
