Top HR KPIs for improving hiring performance (talks with Mazars)

Transform your recruitment process through KPI monitoring

The recruiting world is constantly faced with the need to adapt to market challenges, which sometimes means companies are obliged to rethink their hiring processes to increase efficiency and competitiveness in their industry. Analysing and using recruiting data are essential steps to building a solid hiring strategy and measuring its performance.

When a company undertakes to monitor performance to improve its results, a number of factors must be taken into consideration:

• The choice and order of priority of the data to be monitored
• The reliability of the indicators and data collected
• Teams’ capacity to make data-informed decisions
• Internal communication and acculturation of results

Mazars’s relationship to data and the key role data plays in improving the firm’s HR recruiting processes

Each year 7 experts in the auditing and financial consulting firm hire more than 1,400 employees, and process over 70,000 applications. How do they do it?

4 key takeaways from the webinar (in French) on the top HR KPIs for improving recruiting performances

"We’re in the same playing field, but we don’t all have the same means."

Companies that are market challengers don’t have a choice but to make sure they stand out and offer the best candidate experience. Data analysis makes it easier to identify the most relevant initiatives, i.e. those with potential to draw in the highest number of candidates who are qualified and satisfied with the recruiting process.

At Mazars, HR teams have introduced a new recruiting session methodology, which specifically emphasises soft skills and enables them to hire a year’s worth of employees in only 6 months (versus 9 months under the old model).

"Don’t work with data just for the sake of working with data."

Each indicator needs to make sense, and collectively, your KPIs must be well structured in order to:

Rapidly identify opportunities for improvement, and fulfil objectives

Build a more relevant strategy of means for the following year

At Mazars, each HR-related decision is data-informed and contributes to the continuous improvement of the recruiting process.

"Numbers don’t lie."

Statistics help assess the recruiting process more accurately as a whole, including its sources and results, be they quantitative (high-volume recruiting) or qualitative (specific profiles).

Mazars has been resorting to recruiting firms on a reduced basis, and instead favouring employee referrals. The group also created a new in-house position specially dedicated to candidate sourcing.

"There’s no other choice – data is so vital to the company."

In addition to collecting and analysing data, it is also important to know how to interpret KPIs and capitalise on automation solutions to optimise communication on these KPIs, and market the role of in-house recruiters.

At Mazars, recruitment data is merged with data collected by talent development teams to identify acquisition channels that attract the best candidates – those who will stay on.

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6 key aspects of recruiting for establishing a set of meaningful HR KPIs

Our Talent Acquisition Dashboard provides an overview of several indicators, their progress in relation to the previous reporting period, and how far off they are from defined objectives.

Drawing inspiration from “Hiring Success” by Jérôme Ternynck, we adjusted our dashboard to have it cover a greater number of critical success factors, and provide indicators that are more accessible and easy to monitor.

The Talent Acquisition Dashboard includes 6 major aspects of a recruiting project as well as ideas of KPIs to monitor. It can, of course, be adjusted according to each company’s specificities. In fact, that’s what Mazars did.

Productivity

We measure productivity as the number of hires performed by a full-time-equivalent recruiter over a given period: X hires over the designated period divided by X full-time-equivalent recruiters).

Although this indicator is an easy one to measure, it isn’t easy to improve.

How do you increase annual recruitment rates without impacting the quality of the monitoring carried out for each candidate? By investing in productivity tools that help your recruiters save time.

For example - Let’s say in 2021 you had:

• 3 hiring managers who spent 100% of their time engaging in hiring-related activities
• 1 HR manager who spent 10% of their time engaging in hiring-related activities

Let’s say you hired a total of 36 employees over the course of the year.

Given the above, your productivity ratio would be as follows: 36 / (100% x 3 + 10% x 1) = 11.6 hires per full-time-equivalent recruiter.

Velocity

Velocity refers to temporality and can be defined as the percentage of positions filled within a given timeframe.

For example:

• Let’s say that in 2021, you had planned on hiring:
• 10 employees in Q1. In the end, you recruited 6 people in Q1 and a further 4 in Q2. This means only
• 60% of positions were filled within the given timeframe.

Recruiters will have to look at the positions that weren’t filled in time in order to try and understand why, and implement a suitable action plan.

The average timeframe (% of positions filled in under X months) isn’t a relevant indicator in this case as there are too many disparities resulting from positions and contract types. Due to excessive variance, the average therefore isn’t a meaningful indicator.

Quality

The quality of recruitments is a pivotal factor. If a candidate was adequately assessed and selected based on their hard and soft skills and on their alignment with company values, it is very likely they will thrive in their new position.

As such, retention rates at 6 or 12 months (% of employees still employed in their role 6 or 12 months after being hired) are a reliable indicator of the quality of your recruitments. It is also an easy indicator to monitor and manage, including for our customers.

The retention rate indicator also provides insights into the quality of your onboarding. If an employee leaves the company 5 months after being hired, it will likely be down to poor onboarding by their manager.

In this case, it therefore isn’t due to a recruitment faux pas with regard to the position, but indeed to an error on the part of the employee’s manager who provided a faulty onboarding experience.

It is worth noting that when people leave in the first 6 to 12 months of being hired, it can be because the employee decided themselves to leave or it can be the company’s decision. As such, this indicator takes into account the satisfaction factor on the part of the hired employee and the recruiter.

Cost

We separate the cost factor from the productivity factor above because we believe that cost is a challenge in itself and is associated with a specific indicator: cost-per-hire. Cost-per-hire can be calculated as follows:

Sum of external costs (sourcing + ATS + HR communication + recruiting firms + job boards) and internal costs (tools + fully loaded salary + support costs) related to the recruitment, divided by the number of people hired over the established period.

Candidate experience

The effects of the pandemic must not become an excuse for forgetting the actual underlying trend of labour shortages hitting numerous industries. The “talent war” is a priority issue for HR teams who are more aware than ever of the importance of candidate experience.

Studies have shown that a poor candidate experience could negatively impact companies’ economic performance (especially those operating a B2C model), as 60% of candidates say they would be willing to boycott products/services as a result of a poor experience.

If you understand French, we recommend reading about Virgin Media’s experience to find out more about the adverse effects of a bad candidate experience.

Candidate satisfaction can be measured in relation to the recruitment process as a whole, but also at a given stage.

CleverConnect, for example, provides a satisfaction survey to all those who use its pre-recorded video interviewing solution.

👉 Identify candidate soft skills easily with our Pre-recorded video interview tool

For an overall assessment, a quick questionnaire can suffice to yield useful results in terms of satisfaction rates. Resorting to third-party certifications such as HappyIndex can also be an option.

Inclusiveness

Companies have desperately been trying to get back on the road to growth since 2021, albeit without losing sight of the social and societal role they play. Diversity, equal opportunity, and inclusivity are on the HR agenda in to guarantee virtuous recruiting processes.

Successful inclusion policies (that take into consideration sex, ethnicity, age, level of qualification, etc.) depend on efficient recruiting monitoring tools.

The law already provides quantifiable objectives for these criteria. Each company must define its own objectives for inclusion, based on its background and sensitivities. Our own goal is for each company to identify indicators for inclusion and measure it.

Examples of relevant indicators for measuring inclusion: % of women in the company’s workforce, employee distribution by age, contract type, etc.

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