Are you looking to infuse quality into your talent acquisition metrics? Need a fresh approach to evaluating the effectiveness of your team or individual contributors?
With growing pressure to continuously improve results and prove quality, the time is right to collide metrics within your team and calculate your Recruiter Quality Index.
You can use the RQI at the department and individual level. RQI is calculated using the format above.
The calculation uses the desirable outcomes of new hires and promotions minus undesirable events represented by unwanted turnover of those employed less than one year. Each new hire represents one point, while promotions originated by individuals currently on the team are given two points per occurrence. Unwanted turnover within the first 12 months subtracts from your company in a compounding way. With that consideration, unwanted turnover reduces points by a factor of 1.5 points per occurrence. That total is then divided by the total requisitions that each recruiter handles to calculate the index.
After calculating the departmental or team index, calculate on an individual basis. The team members who fall into the green ranking are your all stars and deserving of any and all programs, incentives, and development paths assigned to the high potentials within your organization. The individuals in the yellow range are your consistent performers who can benefit from additional training and selection techniques. Those team members failing to perform above the red box should be analyzed by uncoupling the H, P, and UT elements to evaluate the challenges they face. Your team may be negatively impacting your organization by solely focusing on near-term metrics such as time to hire or just the number of hires per recruiter.
With talent acquisition playing such an important role in the success of any business, using a RQI gives you a performance measure and a rolling monthly transparency that drives self-management. Tracking promotions by recruiter supports internal mobility and provides inspiration to your team to hire candidates who will thrive under your overall talent management practices.
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Data of all kinds is grabbing attention and headlines and using a simple calculation like the RQI will help you quantify your team and focus on quality.
Some readers may feel that subtracting for turnover is something beyond the control of the recruiter. When developing the RQI significant consideration was given to all sides of the debate. But a recruiter can use their persuasion power to both recommend and eliminate candidates from consideration. Top recruiters provide both guidance and a devil’s advocacy when consulting with hiring managers. At times hiring managers overlook elements not aligning with culture or integration into the team due to the candidate being a referral or are subject to a halo effect due to industry experience or education. RQI is an analysis contributor when creating or improving a performance culture. Using RQI will also help your internal recruiting teams develop a consultative talent acquisition mindset. Many organizations have tight processes and procedures for procurement of goods and services, and talent acquisition needs additional quantifiers and quality checks in its success measurement toolbox.
The RQI is a rolling measurement over the previous 12 months and serves as an instrument of evaluation. The beauty is that it can evaluate the most recent 12 months, a calendar year, or can be applied to the individual’s total tenure with the organization. If you set the data up right you can even measure performance over two specific measures of time. This helps you identify how your team is trending (and don’t mean “trending” on Twitter!) Set the expectation bar high and see how elevated your results can become.
I kind of disagree that “unwanted turnover” should reflect the quality of a recruiter because there could be other organizational factors. Retention, however, measured the other way, is a better indicator in my opinion. So if recruiter X places 12 people and 4 people leave at the one year mark but the rest are retained for 4 years I think that is a more accurate measure than simply taking into account unwanted turnover.
Wanted turnover should be measured as well. What if 12 out of 12 were “wanted turnover”. What does that say not only about the recruiter but about the hiring process as a whole?
“Promotions” seem like an old model indicator. Many organizations are increasingly flat and people move across not just up.
Furthermore, total requisitions worked seems irrelevant if there is nothing to qualify the importance of those hires to an organization.
While everyone loves metrics, this is frankly meaningless.
Rick,
This “scoring” is missing way too many key metric points to determine quality in a recruiter.
Just to name a few…
High Volume vs. Low Volume
Executive vs. Non-Executive
Critical Talent Group vs. Non-Critical Talent Group
Hiring Manager History (in regards to interview process)
Applicant Source of Hire
Competitor Targeting
Time to Slate
Time to Interview
Submittals to Onsite Interview Ratio
Offer Declines
Pipeline Development
Candidate to Applicant Conversion
etc.
I’m one of those guys that think if you measure recruiters and whole talent acquisition teams on Hires, and pretty much nothing else…you are missing the game of what corporate talent acquisition is all about and you will forever live in the world of “transactional” recruiting.
Quality is always such a great discussion point. Though I agree with most of what you have stated, one year seems a bit long for the turnover measurement. If quality was the issue, would we not see that prior to one year? I would be curious to know how others are measuring quality and RQI
I agree with some of the caveats raised in the comments, but overall this is a nice simple metric. One of the key things to remember with metrics is context; none of them exist in a vacuum. So, if the recruiter is dealing with a hiring manager who is notorious for interviewing but never hiring, you can account for that. In fact, you need such metrics for the HMs themselves to make sure you’re not overloading any one recruiter with difficult ones.
Just remember that when you’re rating people with metrics, you’re also rating the metrics themselves. Method and methodology in one shot; here’s the method for rating, but critique it as well while using it to make it better.
Thank you for the comments to my article. Quality is something that requires ongoing
refinement. In recruiting the current common metrics are
one-dimensional. If you have an awesome
metric for time to interview and the candidates are ultimately not hired or turnover
quickly then what value is the metric to the organization? My system examines
one desirable outcome (internal promotion) and one undesirable outcome
(turnover within one year) and looks at those two elements in relation to total
requisitions worked by a recruiter or team.
Is this the only metric to measure, no?
The motivation is to advance and continuously improve. Given the rapid advancement in data and
analytics the talent acquisition community owes it to itself to re-evaluate how
and why we measure. As my Six Sigma
master black belt used to remind us constantly, quality is a journey not a
single solution. RQI is an initial step
on the path to bring forward metrics that measure outcomes rather than just functions
or process steps.
Please reach out to me directly on LinkedIn as the dialogue
can help the recruiting field.
A recruiter is responsible for presenting quality candidates to the hiring manager. The new employee’s manager is responsible for the employee once hired and going forward.