5 Recruiting Reports You Should Be Running

This post on recruiting reports was originally published in March 2017, and updated in May 2022 with new recruiting facts.

Measuring and analyzing every single recruiting metric could be a full-time job, but most Talent Acquisition teams don’t have room in their budget for a dedicated recruiting data analyst. While measuring as many recruiting activities as you can is important, there are reports that provide more impactful insight that you definitely want to pay attention to on a regular basis.

Keeping a tab on top recruiting metrics provides insight into the effectiveness of your recruiting processes so you can see which are operating smoothly and which could benefit from a fresh approach. Recruiting metrics enable recruiting teams to set goals and make decisions based on real data rather than guesswork.

We outlined the 5 most important recruiting reports to run every month to keep your recruiting strategies on track.

1. Time to Hire

Time to hire is the number of days between the first contact with a candidate and the day they accept an offer. Essentially, how long does it take to hire a candidate once they have submitted an application or you have reached out? The average time-to-hire is 41 days across industries, but in a competitive job market like today’s, you want to hire as quickly as possible.

Each day a position is left open, the company is losing money and missing out on candidates who are accepting other offers.  35% of hiring managers say they’ve missed out on a great candidate because their company took too long to make an offer.  Top talent is off the market in as little as 10 days, which means you need to act fast at every stage of recruitment to hang onto the candidates you want.

Tracking time to hire can reveal opportunities to simplify hiring processes, communicate faster, and get best-fit candidates hired quickly. Faster hiring also contributes to a better candidate experience so even job seekers who aren’t hired maintain positive feelings toward your company.

While a competitive hiring landscape is affecting nearly every company looking for talented candidates, monitoring time to hire on a regular basis can help streamline recruiting processes and speed up hiring.

2. Cost of Hire

If you aren’t tracking the cost of hire, you may be missing out on chances to reduce those costs. While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact costs of hiring, SHRM estimates the average cost per hire to be just under $4,700. However, it can often be much higher, with some employers estimating that it can cost three to four times an employee’s salary to replace them.

With hiring cost estimates varying so widely, recording this hiring metric may be eye-opening for your recruiting team and can help ensure recruiting budgets are spent wisely.

But how do you determine hiring costs? There are hard and soft costs, with soft costs making up about 60% of the total cost-of-hire, says author, founder, and SHRM Foundation Chair-Elect Edie Goldberg. Some of the hard costs include:

• Compensation packages for new employees
• Job board posts 
• Any placed advertisements, including sponsored posts on job boards and social media
• Recruiters’ salaries
• Background checks and candidate assessments

Soft costs of recruiting are harder to measure but just as important to take into account. How long did it take the manager to interview? Were there additional people in the interview room? Here are a few examples of soft costs to consider when calculating cost-of-hire:

• Time spent interviewing candidates by hiring managers, team members, and other employees
• Lost productivity due to lack of staff and time spent interviewing
• Cost of losing candidates to competitors
• Mental and emotional toll of competitive hiring landscape on recruiting teams

3. Employee Retention (or Turnover) Rate

Employee retention rates are another important recruiting metric to watch. Not only does high turnover contribute to higher hiring costs, but it can also be an indicator of low quality of hire. If your employees are quitting at rates that are higher than average, there may be an issue in the recruiting process. Maybe job descriptions aren’t accurately describing role requirements or the new hire didn’t feel a connection to company culture.

Learn how to calculate your employee turnover rate and compare it to your industry average to find out if your company needs to work on reducing it. You can calculate turnover for different groups of employees to understand when and where it’s happening:

• New hire turnover
• Turnover by role 
• Turnover by department
• Involuntary and voluntary turnover
• Turnover due to retirement

With this insight, recruiters can ask questions to better understand retention rates — for example, a low retention rate for the sales team:

• When did higher turnover rates in the sales department begin? 
• What are our competitors doing to incentivize their sales teams? 
• Is turnover higher among new or seasoned sales team members? 
• Are sales team members engaged at work?

You’ll get even more benefits from monitoring retention rates when you also keep an eye on employee engagement. Highly engaged employees are up to five times less likely to quit their jobs, so engagement-boosting strategies like recognition programs and flexible work environments will also help retain your top talent.

4. Top Sourcing Channels

Typically, recruiters and dedicated candidate sourcers have numerous channels they use to find potential candidates. But do you know which sourcing channels consistently bring in the highest-quality candidates? It’s important to note which channels are most effective and which need less time and attention. Keep track of where successful new hires were found to determine your company’s most reliable source of candidates.

With every position your company has open, you should track:

• The number of applicants coming from each source
• The number of qualified applicants
• Where the successful candidate first heard about your opening

With a well-equipped Applicant Tracking System (ATS), you can easily capture candidate source data and run a report that shows which sources produce the most qualified candidates and the most successful new hires.

Candidate sourcing isn’t cheap, so gaining this knowledge will save money in the long run because it highlights which channels of recruitment are most effective. If you have a channel that is severely underperforming, then you have the justification you need to shut it down. The same goes for successful channels — with the data to back you up, you can confidently allocate more resources to those channels.

5. Vacant Positions vs. Total Number of Positions

You can calculate the percentage of vacant positions compared to the total number of positions by department or for the whole company. Ideally, there should be a low amount of vacancies open compared to the number of total positions.

This recruiting report can quickly tell you if your organization is understaffed or help you understand which roles may be particularly competitive.

While recruiters may not need to know — or have the time to understand — every single recruiting metric out there, these five offer crucial insight that can lead to maximum recruiting success. The easiest way to report on these metrics accurately and consistently is to invest in an ATS that gathers data and automatically generates useful reports.

Fortunately, ClearCompany’s award-winning ATS can give you the data you need for a deeper understanding of your recruiting processes. Run recruiting reports and see firsthand how your company can benefit from data-informed insights with ClearCompany — sign up for a demo today.