The 5 kpis we use to measure recruiting success at greenhouse: kpi #3

2 mins, 29 secs read time

This is the fourth post in a series about the 5 key performance indicators (KPIs) we use at Greenhouse to measure our recruiting team’s success. Learn the methodology behind our KPIs in the introductory post and find the description of the first KPI here and the second KPI here.

When you’re looking for ways to measure your recruiting team’s success, it makes sense to have a metric that relates to timeliness. You want to see how fast (or slowly!) your pipeline is moving so that you can start to predict when new hires will join your organization.

But it’s really important to make sure you’re measuring the right thing. It can be tempting to focus on time to fill, which is the number of days between when a role is posted and when an offer is accepted. But we’ve realized that time to fill results aren’t always especially helpful (more on that in a minute).

So, which KPI do we use to measure timeliness in the recruiting pipeline? And how can you begin to measure it at your organization? Read on to find out!

KPI #3: Days to offer

Days to offer allows you to track how quickly candidates move through your recruiting and interview process.

This KPI measures the number of days that pass between when someone applies and ultimately accepts or rejects their offer. You can average this across all roles and get a sense of the true average speed of your interview process.

We have settled on this metric of efficiency for two reasons:

1. Many roles are left open continuously, so starting your count from the date a job is opened can drag your average way up. For example, if you’ve been continuously hiring sales reps for the last 18 months, a time to fill of 540 days for the last rep hired doesn’t tell you much about the last candidate to go through your process. In fact, it makes things look bad when they really aren’t.
2. Many factors contribute to the amount of time that passes between when a candidate signs an offer letter and when they start their first day of work—many of which have to do with personal obligations or commitments to their former employers.

In the end, you’re trying to gain insight into the recruiting team’s process and throughput, and days to offer does this best. Finance and senior leadership may be interested in some ancillary reporting about candidate start dates, but that information isn’t as insightful and actionable for a recruiting team that is optimizing its process.

Benchmark

Wondering how your organization measures up? Across Greenhouse customers, the average days to offer is 39 days.

Move on to our 4th recruiting KPI

Eager? You can get all five KPIs in one handy format when you download our ebook, “The 5 Recruiting Key Performance Indicators.”