Automation and the Future of Recruiting KPIs

Currently, recruiting operates within a pretty fixed set of key performance indicators. You have the number of qualified candidates discovered; time to fill; offer acceptance rate; cost per hire; retention rate; sourcing channel efficiency; and so on. This is all well and good, and such core metrics will always be important.

But at present, it is hard to move beyond this set of evaluation methods to more refined and more creative sorts of self-assessment. Why? Because a recruiter’s time is dominated by repetitive and time-consuming tasks, meaning they don’t have the bandwidth to gather or analyze data in new and unique ways.

This is where an AI recruiting partner like a Wendy can come in so useful. Wendy takes an assignment, and scours through her vast database for suitable job-seekers. She engages passive candidates, screens active ones, and conducts conversations that are patient and highly personalized. Wendy handles the top-of-funnel tasks, right up to enabling the hiring team to make an informed hiring decision.

When recruiters can offload mundane responsibilities, they give themselves the chance to explore, develop and optimize all-new KPIs. They can think long and hard about what “quality of hire” actually means. They can properly analyze their decision-making processes, and began to examine data patterns regarding what profiles of people make for a good quality of hire. Such processes of experimentation can be a major boost to diversity in hiring.

With a healthy amount of time for real candidate relationship management, recruiters can get more micro, with a measurement like time-to-onboarding. They can also get more macro, with a broad assessment like lifetime candidate value. They can tailor success measurements to each individual candidate, and each individual industry. Every hiring experience can be customized so that KPIs are no longer conjured with a broad brush, but defined in terms of the specific features of a certain role. The post-hire candidate experience can be examined, rather than ignored as soon as a role is filled.

At a high level, recruiting and HR can start to blend a little more. Right now, people only think of HR in a post-hire context. But it would be far more productive if HR was invested in the whole of the recruiting experience.
Recruiters can bring new KPIs to their interaction with companies, too. They can spend more time understanding their needs in a deep and complex fashion. By doing this, rather than just supplying individuals, recruiters can focus on building teams. They can examine how different attributes and different personality types interact and work together, opening up a whole world of predictive recruiting. Recruiters can get comfier with the intricacies of company compensation structures. They can bear in mind their multi-quarter goals.

New KPIs could also be based around self-assessment. With the help of automation, recruiters can find the time to look at the data and patterns regarding their own performance, and analyse where they can improve. Across the board, they can spend less time on to-do lists, and more time on strategy.

At Wade and Wendy, we like to talk about the “deep work” of recruiting. Automation, we believe, will usher in a future where the profession includes much more of this deep work. This shift will create these more advanced, more interesting KPIs, infusing the whole world of recruiting with more innovation and more intelligence.