Do your employers know how much value you provide to them? Do they know how much more value your staffing services offer over your competitors? How do they know for sure the strategic value that your company provides?

Measuring the impacts to your efforts to your employer’s bottom-line is one of the most credible ways for recruitment professionals to gain respect as true strategic business partners. Quantifying your value demonstrates your strategic value especially at the executive level where important decisions are made. Also accurate and consistent measurement allows you to set goals, chart your progress, and improve your processes to achieve better results. Despite all the strategic benefits of measuring your recruitment value, many recruitment professionals do not engage in these important activities. There are many key measurements related to recruitment. We will focus on a few major measurements that can help you demonstrate your value as a staffing agency to your employers.

The message that you want to communicate to your employers with these measurements is that you help them find quality candidates, quickly and in a cost-effective manner. The goal is to show the employer that you can provide a better staffing service than your competitors and maybe even better than the employer themselves. While this may appear daunting, here are a few simple measurements that can help support your case:

Quality of hire

In today’s war for talent, it is important for you to show the employer that you not only put bodies in seats but that you place quality candidates in their organization. The quality of hire is one of simplest measurements to demonstrate the quality of your candidates. This measurement can be obtained from surveys, screening ratios and acceptance rates..

Screening ratios can indicate the quality of the candidates you send to the hiring manager. This ratio can be determined by looking at the number interviews granted per application sent. The goal is to prove that you provide better candidates based on the num

The offer and acceptance rates can also be telling of quality. The purpose of this metric is to show the quality of your candidates based on the number of job offers or acceptances per number of applications or job interviews completed. For example, suppose the employer interviewed 10 of your candidates and from this, the employer made 6 job offers. In this case, your offer rate is 60%. Now suppose without your help, using the same definition above, the employer’s offer rate is 20%. You now have a compelling evidence to support the assertion that your employer receives better candidates with your help. Using offer and acceptance rates is a simple way to demonstrate the quality of your candidates to your client.

A typical quality of hire survey will ask the hiring manager key questions pertaining to their new hire. These questions can relate to your candidate’s work quality, processes, and so on. The most important question in this type of survey would be to assess the hiring manager’s overall satisfaction with this hiring decision. An example of a possible question would include “would you re-hire the candidate again?”. Today there are many online surveying tools that can make this very cost-effective to implement.

The purpose of the above quality of hire metrics is to provide your employer a tangible metric to prove that you provide quality candidates. In developing these metrics, it would be ideal if you could align your measurement to your client’s to facilitate an easy comparison and benchmark. The goal is to show the employer that you provide quality candidates, maybe even better than ones they can find. How powerful would it be for you if 90% of your client’s managers would hire your candidates again while only 70% would hire the ones sourced without you.

Time to fill In the business world, speed is essential to success. The purpose to measuring the time to fill a vacancy will is to demonstrate your responsiveness to an employer’s hiring needs. The time required for an individual recruiter to fill a vacant position says a great deal about his or her market and client knowledge, sourcing and screening abilities and processes. Filling a vacancy quickly can save your client more than just than just time. For employers, the time a vacancy remains open can mean lost revenue, opportunities, productivity and so on.

The time to fill a vacancy can be measured in the time between receiving your client’s request and the day your candidate accepted the offer. Be sure the start and end dates you chose in this measurement does not include factors beyond your control. Therefore the start and end dates you choose will depend on exactly what you want to measure. For example, some HR professionals use the employee’s first day of work as the end point of their metric. For recruitment companies, this end point may not work so well as it includes project start dates and on boarding processes that could be beyond your accountability.

Cost per hire

In today’s business climate, what company is not cost conscious? The cost per hire is simply the total cost of hiring a resource divided by the number of total hires. Here you simply want to show your employer the cost effectiveness of using your staffing services on it’s own merit or compared to your competitors.

Summary

While numbers can never articulate the value of a great recruiter and/or staffing company, it can help you demonstrate your value and competitive difference to the employers that use your service. These staffing metrics have a better chance of being seen at the executive level where they have little or no opportunity to see first hand the qualified candidates you provide that become the life blood of their organization. So by demonstrating that you provide quality candidates in a cost-effective way, you will be taking a step beyond lip service and a step ahead of your competitors.