Mastering the Recruiter Performance Review: Measuring Contribution with Data
Table of Contents
Two recruiters on your team have both filled 10 jobs, with similar pass through rates in the funnel. Who worked harder? Who’s more skilled? Who deserved the promotion? The story of recruiting performance is hidden in headcount, and lost via spreadsheet-managed change. This article covers key data that helps run a more efficient, predictable recruiting team, eliminating the anecdotal story telling about the work produced by the service of recruiting.
First, we’ll cover the 5 categories of performance management. Next, we’ll dive into the metrics, where to pull them, and how to use them to performance manage your team. Last, we’ll dive into understanding the relationship between these categories of data, so you can craft a narrative as you report on recruiting performance.
The 5 Categories of Recruiter Performance Management
Fills – Did the recruiter deliver on their expected hiring targets, as defined by either the manager or the business?
Efficiency – Was the recruiter efficient in moving candidates through the pipeline?
Objection Handling – How well did the recruiter handle challenges, from hiring manager changes to candidate objections?
Workload – What was the level of difficulty associated with the recruiter’s workload? (Not all roles are equally difficult.)
Experience – Did the recruiter create a positive experience for candidates and hiring managers?
Fill Metrics: Evaluating Recruiter Production
Fills vs. Demand: Did the recruiter meet hiring targets requested by the business?
Fills vs. Capacity: Did they meet the targets set by their manager?
Hires on Time: Were roles filled within the timeframes expected by finance and hiring managers?
These metrics give a clear picture of production performance and help resolve discrepancies between managers' expectations and hiring managers' experiences.
Scenario Example
Recruiter 1:
Capacity: 36 hires/year (3/month)
Business Demand: 48 hires/year (4/month)
Actual Hires: 40 hires
Recruiter 2:
Capacity: 36 hires/year (3/month)
Business Demand: 32 hires/year
Actual Hires: 32 hires
In this case, Recruiter 1 exceeded manager-set expectations but didn’t meet the higher demand set by hiring teams. Recruiter 2, meanwhile, met hiring demand but didn't reach full capacity. Data like this provides a balanced view, helping manage both manager and hiring team expectations.Executive insights from the waterfall report
Efficiency Metrics: Measuring Effort-to-Output
Source to Application Rate: Quality of sourcing effort & outreach
Recruiter to hiring Manager Conversion Rate: The ability of a recruiter to identify talent during the sourcing or inbound review process, that aligns with hiring manager expectations. Low conversion rates means recruiters need training in identifying quality resumes
Hiring Manager to Onsite Ratio: A measure of a recruiter’s alignment to the hiring manager needs. If recruiters are passing along resumes that hiring mangers don’t like, this will be reflected in their experience scores. Low conversion rates should trigger investigations into the intake session & candidate calibration processes during a recruiter kickoff.
Onsite to Offer Ratio: A measure of alignment between the entire decision making hiring team. Whether the recruiter directly manages this process, or is expected to flag misalignment for their manager to handle at the leadership level, low onsite to offer conversion rates are costly given the time investment of the team to complete the interview and the impact of declining a candidate at this late stage.
Offer to Accept Ratio : This could indicate a few things. The first, this could be a measure of a recruiters ability to manage expectations or “pre-close” a candidate. Second, it could be an indication of a hiring manager’s expectations not aligning to the compensation/leveling framework of the business. (Think 10 years of experience for an entry level role). Last it could be an indication compensation misalignment with the market.
Time to Fill/Time to Start: While time-to-fill can add useful context, it’s often impacted by factors outside of the recruiter's control, like workload complexity or hiring manager expectations.
Funnel conversion rates highlight efficiency, helping you assess if resources were used effectively.
Objection Handling Metrics: Measuring Blockers to Production
Offer Declines & Reasoning: How many offer declines did the recruiter get and what was the reason?
Another metric into pre-closing & managing hiring manager expectations. Finding the candidate a hiring manager wants is equally as important as them actually getting the candidateHiring Manager Changes: How many times did a hiring manager change the goal posts on hiring?
If a role changes while the recruiter is working on it, it’s likely they won’t fill it on time. If the compensation changes at the offer period, it’s likely the recruiter won’t close the candidate. Tracking these changes give important context to how hiring managers impact recruiters ability to do their job.
Expedited Requisitions: How many roles were impossible to fill on time based on the context of their request?
If you ask me to fill a role by next week it’s impossible. But at the end of the year, all that’s remembered is a missed offer date. It’s important to understand how many reqs were impacted by late approvals, or shortened recruiting times. It helps cover a recruiter when they are under pressure about hires on time.
Recruiters often face obstacles like shifts in hiring manager expectations or candidate objections. By measuring these factors, you can better understand the effort required for each recruiter and balance workload accordingly.
Workload Metrics: Assessing Work Complexity
Average Job Level: What was the average job level of the roles a recruiter was asked to fill>
A general rule of thumb is that higher-level roles are generally more challenging to fill. There are less candidates (especially inbound) as you move up the career ladder and these usually require more sourcing, more complex compensation negotiations, and an understanding of non-salaried compensation.
High-Priority Fills: How many high-priority roles did a recruiter fill?
Priority fills involve more updates and stakeholder involvement. Their impact is high visibility, and require executive communication skills.
Total Hiring Managers Served: How many different hiring managers did a recruiter support?
More hiring managers mean greater workload complexity. It’s more sync meetings, more weekly updates. It’s varying intake session processes, and interpretations of job leveling framework. It’s less consensus about “high priority”
Unique Job Titles Filled: How many different pipelines did a recruiter work?
Filling a variety of roles requires more effort than similar roles. Different pitches, compensation plans, and recruiting processes.
Net New Positions: How many roles did a recruiter work that have never previously existed at the company?
New roles require added work for JD development, intake sessions, and process calibration. Starting from scratch takes more effort than repeating a role that already has defined success metrics
Non-Production Projects: What projects distracted a recruiter from production metrics, and what value was it to the business.
Extra projects outside of regular recruiting duties impact production, while simultaneously adding value to the recruiting team.
Workload metrics reflect the complexity and intensity of a recruiter’s tasks, offering additional context when evaluating production. These metrics help clarify differences between recruiters with similar fill counts.
Experience Metrics: Evaluating Candidate and Hiring Manager Satisfaction
Candidate NPS: Did candidates enjoy the experience of working with the recruiter?
Hiring Manager NPS: Did hiring mangers enjoy the experience of working with the recruiter?
External Reviews: Did the work of the recruiter make it to a public review board?
These metrics gauge satisfaction and overall experience quality, helping to identify high-performing recruiters who create positive interactions with candidates and hiring managers alike.
Putting all of these metrics together for a unified story
Whether you’re a recruiter looking to advocate for your own performance review, or a manager looking to manage a performance review, these metrics are subject to the context of your business. Hypergrowth companies (like when I was at Uber) prioritize production in a recruiter performance review, where more hires = better performance. Mature companies may focus on conversion rate & experience. There’s no “right way” to apply these metrics in your performance environment, but having objective data, and a weighting system that’s consistent across all recruiters is critical for having a sustainable performance process that retains recruiters, identfies development area and rewards behaviors your company views as “high performance”
headcount365’s automates the production of performance metrics & enriches them with intelligence from activity.
After reading this article, you might find these metrics make sense on paper, but are too laborious to produce using the spreadsheets and tools currently available at your business. This is one of the many reasons we built headcount365. You should have real-time access to this information without hours of work to track changes or pull reports from your ATS.
If you’re interested in how these metrics can be automatically produced for you into a cohesive recruiter scorecard, reach out for a demo!
