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Recruiting, talent management, and HR professionals in general have been using metrics for many years now. More often than not, the story HR metrics tell is irrelevant or disappointing. Over the past three decades, I’ve compiled a long list of common metrics mistakes that you can use to assess your measurement efforts and improve your efforts to get the attention of your management and senior leadership.

25 Most Damaging Metric Errors

Following are 25 of the most damaging mistakes you can make when using metrics to assess or defend your performance presented in five categories. keep reading…

There are two fundamental types of hiring strategies: high volume and high impact. Most corporate directors of recruiting think that the most common, high-volume recruiting, has the highest overall impact because, after all, it is used to fill a large number of openings.

However, senior executives in sports, entertainment, the military, and executive search know that the highest impact comes from hiring or retaining a handful of high-value individuals known as game-changers. keep reading…

We are in interesting times with regards to corporate recruiting. This is a Big Inflection Point in the business cycle (arguably the largest one many of us will experience in our lifetimes) and recruiting departments are really stretched.

Part of the challenge corporate recruiting departments face today are a result of not recognizing “False Economies.” A False Economy is when something seems like a great deal or a good idea, but the economics are not what they seem when viewed more holistically or from a different vantage point. This is usually a result of tension between short-term objectives and long-term objectives: value is typically traded between the two. Jack Welch famously remarked about two years ago that “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world …”

That is an interesting insight to reflect upon in light of managing a corporate recruiting operation.

There are a host of potential False Economies in corporate recruiting departments — things that seem like they save money or create value, but in reality the true net economic value is substantially less. Identifying and understanding these False Economies will be imperative for staffing leaders to navigate the rough waters ahead.

One timely example is recruiting team capacity … many organizations currently have an insufficient capacity model for the current demand plan. This typically results in overspending that is far greater than the cost of deploying a more sustainable resource model. At the center of the dilemma is the substantial difference between maximum capacity and optimal capacity. Many corporate recruiting departments have been cut so much that they would need to operate at maximum capacity to meet the needs of the business. This is unsustainable, like running your car at redline all the time: sure you can do it, but how long is it going to last? keep reading…

Many recruiters lose too many good candidates at the beginning of the sourcing and recruiting process, due to lack of basic recruiting skills. As a result, they work too hard screening more candidates than necessary and lowering overall candidate quality, since they let the best ones get away without a fight. The problem starts by not responding properly to the “what’s the job?” or “what’s the comp?” question when first engaging with a hot prospect. keep reading…

Imagine an international standard for determining cost of hire. Or one for valuing the human capital of a company.

A pipe dream just a few years ago, now both are possible following yesterday’s decision by the International Organization for Standardization.

“A major milestone was passed,” says Lee Webster, SHRM’s director of HR standards. “There’s a lot of work, but we’re on the way.”

What the ISO approved was an application by the American National Standards Institute to develop globally applicable HR standards. It’s a companion effort to the one underway now to create HR standards for the U.S.

Lead by SHRM, the first standard — to create a uniform way of measuring cost of hire — is working its way through the public comment process. That closes March 18th. Depending on the comments and suggestions that come in, the proposal could become a standard by the summer. keep reading…

I’ve been thinking a lot about speed.

Things are starting to loosen up in the talent marketplace. Candidates are now comfortable changing jobs. Jobless claims are dropping, as is the unemployment rate, but there are not a huge amount of new jobs being created (yet). So The Great Churn of 2011 has begun, as employees (including recruiters) start to change companies after having hunkered down for the last three years. And this is putting increased pressure on corporate recruiting departments, most of which have been cut in ways we haven’t before seen. My prediction is that 2011 will be a tough year for most corporate recruiting departments.

Which brings us back to speed. keep reading…

We have been hearing about how the shortage of talent in the market has been impacting business and its growth for a quite a few years. Given the current economic climate, it now seems that the opposite is actually true, where a lot of qualified candidates are available in the marketplace and the companies are finding it difficult to source and recruit the right ones.

The key is to come up with a water-tight recruiting strategy and measure its success using the right metrics. This outline will help companies do just that. keep reading…

Recruiters have not paid very much attention to the quantitative side of quality of hire. We frequently talk about hiring manger satisfaction and other subjective measures of quality, but I don’t know of any recruiting function that has even tried to measure, quantitatively, the value or contribution of people who have been hired.

I have used examples in the past that place a value on a function within an organization in terms of its cumulative contribution to sales, number of patents produced, or depth of contact with a customer.

Yet, it has been hard to bring this down to an individual level and precisely say that employee A contributed X dollars of value. We never get to this level of precision (or even want to), but we are getting closer to understanding and measuring the skills and attributes that contribute to overall organizational success.

For example, which recruiter is the “best” in your department? Which assessment test provides a higher quality candidate? How much do diverse hires contribute to success? How many good candidates were rejected because of faulty assessment practices or inappropriate tools? We could add many more questions to this list, but getting answers even to these few is a challenge.

The answers require a standard that you would like to achieve, or a quantified definition of such concepts as “best” and “successful.” Once those have been defined, then the challenge is to find a process and tool to measure them. keep reading…

Cost of hire is one of the most elementary of recruiting metrics. Yet if you’ve ever tried to do the math, you’ve discovered just how treacherous it can be.

Now comes the draft of what may become a national standard for calculating the cost per hire metric. After 18 months of work, a blue-ribbon group of volunteers is looking for public comment on the 43-page document they developed, which details two types of measures — one for internal use and one for external comparison with similar, other employers.

The draft of the proposal by the Cost Per Hire Workforce, led by Jeremy Shapiro of Morgan Stanley, is available here. Comments should be made at the same place. There’s a link at the top left of the page. The deadline is March 18. keep reading…

In a recent ERE article I made the contention that if you wanted to convert a corporate recruiting department into a competitive internal executive search group, you had to first develop the hiring process recruiters would use, before you hired the recruiters. This is primarily attributed to the fact that the external executive search business model and most of the processes they use are fundamentally different than, and often in conflict with, a corporation’s.

With this “ process first” mindset, the solution to this dilemma is to start with a process that maximizes QoH and then find recruiters who are fully capable and motivated to implement this process. keep reading…

As might be expected from the pickup in overall hiring in the U.S., college seniors are looking at the best job hunting season in at least three years. And a new popularity monitor from AfterCollege is offering insights into where the students will be hunting.

A survey out last September from the National Association of Colleges and Employers predicted employers would increase their 2011 hiring of graduating students by 13.5 percent.

So far, that prediction seems to be holding. Though down seasonally from November, December’s monthly NACE Index, which tracks hiring intent and recruiting activity, was solidly on the positive side. The Index, based on a survey of NACE’s 111 member companies, was substantially above where it was a year before. For the December survey, 46.5 percent of the respondents said they expected to do more college hiring in 2011 than in 2010.

Those numbers track well with the September prediction that had 47.7 percent of the NACE respondents expecting to do more college hiring. keep reading…

I had lunch with a colleague a few weeks ago who is the author of a book called “The Paradox of Excellence: How your great performance can kill your business.” He had been CEO of a midsize public company for many years and more recently a consultant for several well known Bay Area tech firms. He told me there are indicators that can be evaluated and fixed before companies or people in business fail.

I’ve taken the liberty of interpreting the questions he asks company CEOs and translating them into recruiting terms.

The core questions are the same. keep reading…

For those who attended my session at the ERE Fall Expo, you heard first-hand about CACI’s Predictive Staffing Model and were the recipient of a “secret recipe” which when prepared correctly will make you a “talent hero” at your company. CACI’s Predictive Staffing Model is a proactive, forward-looking talent approach driven by this secret recipe which was concocted in the hollows of Wild and Wonderful West Virginia, which I’m proud to say is my home state. The secret recipe for your success is simple and has three key ingredients: keep reading…

With access to and leverage of talent playing a more critical role in an organization’s ability to succeed than ever before, it should come as no surprise that the financial analyst community would start evaluating talent management capability when rating organizations. The fact that analysts historically haven’t paid much attention to factors like an organization’s ability to recruit, develop, or retain top talent has allowed HR to operate pretty much “under the radar,” without standardized analytics.

The OMG moment for talent management leaders is coming. keep reading…

It’s time to rethink how recruiters are being assessed, throwing away many traditional metrics, Linda Brenner said today at her pre-conference ERE workshop in Hollywood, Florida.

Brenner advocated what’s called an “assessment center” approach. Originally developed in 1956 for AT&T for hiring/promotion screening, assessment centers are intensive, multi-part testing and evaluation processes.

To make them work, Brenner says you’ll need several things.

Linda Brenner

You’ll want to have a clear understanding of the core competencies required for success in the job, whether it be for a recruiting coordinator or a director. You’ll have to have the ability to simulate those competencies, and to objectively evaluate the range of performance from fair to poor. Lastly, you’ll need to go in with the intention of taking action based on the results of the assessments.

One participant in today’s workshop said her recruiting department used an assessment-center approach, and realized that some results surprised her — and some did not. The people she thought were the “good sourcers” did indeed turn out to be good, and the “bad sourcers” did measure poorly. Across the board, however, among many of the company’s recruiters, interview skills fell surprisingly short.

How Time’s Spent

Brenner said that figuring out how recruiters spend their time (a topic she has written about before), and whether that’s creating the results you’re looking for, is a good thing to start thinking about when examining your metrics and moving to an assessment-center approach. keep reading…

Quality of hire is always a subject of much debate. Some argue that most of the measures in use actually measure the quality of the hiring process versus the quality of the actual hires made. We agree that some of these hire-quality measures are more process oriented, but one thing that cannot be disputed is that the vast majority of models in place today ignore the total workforce (all forms of labor that execute work in the organization’s name), focusing instead just on regular employees.

The significance of the contingent workforce is ignored in a wide variety of places. Whether you believe it is true or not, the statistics tell us that, regular employees are comprising a smaller percentage of the modern enterprises workforce. In the United States it is widely reported that between 8-10% of the workforce is contingent, but like most government-supplied data, that figure is flawed. keep reading…

A SHRM task force is readying what could become the first U.S. standard for calculating “Cost Per Hire.”

A draft standard is currently circulating among members of SHRM’s Staffing and Workforce Planning committee. Eventually, after the comments have been reviewed and any issues that turn up get resolved, the proposal will be submitted to the American National Standards Institute.

There, it will go through a review and a public comment period before becoming an official standard. When that happens, employers conforming to the standard will have confidence that they are comparing apples to apples. Equally important is that as the number of standards grows — and SHRM is already working on others — HR will join other business units in having a uniform set of metrics by which to measure and be measured.

The Cost Per Hire standard itself is fairly straightforward. Chances are you already are taking into account all or most of the elements the draft standard says you should. In that case, the standard validates your process. It also will serve as a checklist to make sure you’re not missing anything. keep reading…

HR Tech introduced six companies to a comfortably large gathering of HR professionals and techies Thursday afternoon who gathered to see the “Awesome New Technologies for HR,” as the session was billed.

While there was a “gee whiz” factor to some of them, I don’t know how many  achieved the session’s goal, which was “to blow your mind.” But then, each of the presenters only got 10 minutes for their show and tell.

SocializedHR, with it’s cool (OK, awesome) iPhone app, managed a little buzz, even if the ResuReader app is a solution in search of a problem. As demoed by Peter Levy, CEO of parent company Veechi Corp., a recruiter at a job fair, on a college recruiting visit, or elsewhere who is handed a paper resume need only snap a picture and submit it. The SocializedHR backend parses the data, fields it, and can hand it off to an ATS. Meanwhile the recruiter can rate the candidate, make a few notes in text or voice (or both), snap the candidate’s picture, and have it all integrated into a single profile. keep reading…

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Not being Valentine’s Day, nor the 24/7 romantic, some of you might be confused. Of course, in this case I’m referring to quality of hire. It’s a worthy topic, but like a cloud, it’s hard to get your arms around. When should it be measured is as difficult to answer as how. “Why” adds another set of variables to the mix. I’ve just volunteered to help HR.com develop a curriculum for a new Quality of Hire educational program it’s launching, so I figured it might make sense to get some discussion going on this important topic, starting with what, when, why, and how. My viewpoint follows, but don’t hesitate to add your own to the conversation. keep reading…

One of Jobvite’s strengths has always been its ability to track an “invited” candidate back from the application to see how they came to learn of an opening. Now, Jobvite is adding more depth and breadth to its tracking, giving recruiters data about their job postings and the effectiveness of their own career site.

Announced today, the real-time recruiting intelligence can tell you how many people saw an an ad or visited your career site, what they did and, if you have Jobvite Hire, which includes an ATS, what you did.

For instance, if you distributed a job through social sites, sent a Jobvite to your employees, and posted it to traditional job boards, the recruiter intelligence part of the Jobvite dashboard can give you the number of visitors to each page where the ad appeared; how many then opened it; how many of them applied, and how many were interviewed, and, finally, if a hire was made, from where. keep reading…