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 will find 15 essential KPIs with which you can easily measure RMA success.
An overview of recruitment marketing KPIs
There are tons of valuable KPIs that can give you great insights and help you optimise your recruitment strategy. In this blog, we list 15 key KPIs for measuring recruitment marketing success.
- CPM
- CTR
- CPC
- Conversion
- Cost per lead
- Cost per acquisition
- Channel effectiveness
- Quality of applicants
- Interviews per hire
- Recruitment happiness 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 phase in recruitment is attracting talent and you do this 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, above all you want to reach your target audience and to check how successful you are at this, check the cost per mille. (CPM)
CPM = (number of views / 1,000) / ad budget spent
Just looking at the number of views or reach of a campaign makes little sense, as this is very much dependent on the ad budget you 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. Naturally, you want these to be as high as possible. Therefore, it is useful to find out how many people actually click through after seeing your ad. You measure this with the CTR.
CTR = number of clicks to landing page / number of views x 100%
By the way, CTR is not uninteresting for awareness campaigns either. After all, with visibility campaigns you don't just want to reach people, but preferably also enthuse them. A click on your ad is an indication that people find the content attractive and therefore 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)
Maybe 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 focus on 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 why you use recruitment marketing automation. 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, for example by 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 proportion of the workforce is actively looking for 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 in 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 other communication tools than your job 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 via 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 = advertising 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 application. The lower your CPA, the more effective your recruitment marketing actions are.
CPA = advertising 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 use 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
Additionally, you can very well use all the above KPIs to compare channels. 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 relation to the time you spend on using that particular channel. Suppose a recruiter spends one day a week on sourcing and gets 10 candidates a month from this. That same recruiter needs 2 hours a week to carry out social advertising and 14 candidates a month come out of this. A quick calculation shows that social advertising is proportionally much more effective than sourcing.
Channel effectiveness (time-based) = number of qualified candidates from a specific channel per period / time spent in hours on this specific channel per period
KPIs for response quality
It's not just about the quantity of candidates your recruitment marketing generates, the quality of 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 produces little return. 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 pass the initial selection and compare this with the number of candidates in total. 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 candidates passing initial screening / total number of candidates x 100%
9. Interviews per hire
Conducting interviews with candidates is essential to the recruitment process, but it is very time-consuming for recruiters, hiring managers and candidates at the same time. If you need very many interviews to fill a vacancy, this 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 organisation.
You can calculate the interviews per hire ratio for various departments or locations to discover differences between them and make improvements where needed.
10. Job-hire ratio
As with interviews per hire, the interview-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 many candidates drop out during the process itself, it is a sign that the follow-up is too slow or the candidate journey is not well designed. So ideally, this ratio should be as low as possible.
Job-hire ratio = number of applications / number of hires
KPI for the candidate experience
11. Candidate NPS
A positive candidate experience is hugely important for your recruitment success now and in the future. Candidates who have a pleasant experience of applying 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 impact 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 whether they would recommend you, you now ask candidates and in context as an employer. From there, your Candidate NPS rolls out!
Candidate NPS = percentage of promoters - percentage of detractors
Recruitment marketing automation allows you to improve the candidate experience in various ways. Lead generation makes your organisation more approachable and ensures the process feels more equitable; thanks to automation, you can speed up follow-ups and save recruiters a great deal of time on routine tasks, allowing them to devote 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 improvement achieved by deploying RMA software, look at the number of vacancies 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 jobs in progress / number of FTEs working on these jobs (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 - gives you.
13. Time to interview
This is the time it takes you to get to an initial interview with a candidate. The shorter it 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 = number of days from job posting to first interview
14. Time to fill
Time to fill indicates how many days it takes from job posting to accepting 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 an offer of employment
This KPI is regularly confused with time to hire, but the two have an important difference. With 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. The time to hire therefore mainly says something about the application process, while the 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 cost per hire is also relevant for recruitment agencies, 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 licences - and the indirect costs associated with recruitment. Consider the hours and salary costs of recruiters and recruitment marketers.
Bonus for recruitment agencies
As a recruitment agency, there are 2 more KPIs you'll want to keep an eye on:
- Fill ratio = the number of jobs for which you achieve placements / the number of jobs you hire x 100%
- Re-placement ratio = the number of candidates you re-place after an initial placement / the total number of candidates placed x 100%
These KPIs will give you insight into the success of your entire recruitment strategy and show you whether you are making smart use of talent pools.
Start small
If you want to keep it simple and clear, start with these 5 KPIs:
- Conversion
- Recruitment happiness ratio
- Candidate NPS
- Time to fill
- Cost per hire
Then you can keep expanding your dashboarding and gather more valuable insights, so that you turn the right buttons to get the best results.
Measure, evaluate and adjust
Ultimately, of course, it's not about measuring numbers, but about transitioning from numbers to insights and improvements. Use these KPIs to compare recruitment methods and channels and chart changes over time. By analysing and adjusting periodically, recruiting new employees 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 will find 15 essential KPIs with which you can easily measure RMA success.
