To help you measure how effective your recruitment team is, we’ve put together a list of 5 metrics to consider. From focusing on results, to looking at less tangible soft skills, here’s what you should look for when measuring your recruitment team’s effectiveness…
Metric 1: Results
It’s not rocket science - your team need to be delivering bottom line value in to the business. If they don’t, what’s the point in employing them? I chat to too many business owners who have not worked out from the outset what that bottom line is per employee and therefore per team. When I am asked how to do this I say it is a straight forward return on your investment from this employee.
So, if you pay someone a salary what is the business getting in return? Fortunately, in recruitment this is easy to work out. Calculate all the employee’s costs, salary, taxes, benefits, pensions, phone or laptop equipment, monthly sales expenses to do their job and then multiply this figure by 3.5 (or 4.5 if you have plush expensive offices!). From there, you get the minimum contribution each employee must bring in to the business. Then total these all together to find the amount your team needs to bring in.
Metric 2: Attendance
This seems an obvious one but if your employees are not here they are not really performing! Team attendance is a good temperature gage for your business and poor attendance can tell you much more than good attendance can. Now don’t get me wrong we all get ill but if it is happening on a regular basis it can be the sign of lack of motivation, health issues, or burnout and it is worth keeping an eye out for any of these symptoms. At Firefish, we use a nifty piece of software called BreatheHR and it is easy for employees to manage their time, holidays and absenteeism through this. It also allows you as a manager to monitor trends and benchmark staff against what is called the Bradford Factor which gives each employee an absence weighting.
Read: What's Stopping Us From Growing Remote Recruitment Teams?
Metric 3: Input
One really important metric that I have always stressed to business owners is that each employee brings their own unique blend of skills to the party. It is your job to allow them to apply and use those skills. As you grow an SME business you need team players who are flexible and can pick up areas of the business that they can run with and improve on for you. As they push areas of the business forward, monitor this and if it works always aim to turn this into a scalable process. This could be your candidate assessment structure, social media strategy, new business development processes - it doesn’t matter. As long as the individual is contributing to improving something as the business grows and you reuse the work. The owners that have a group of individuals working away on their own stuff and have no forum for sharing ideas amongst themselves are in my book nuts or even stronger pissing their investment down the drain.
Metric 4: Likability
Never underestimate the team player, the person that seems to effortlessly glue the team together. They are worth their weight in gold for lots of reasons that are hard to measure. For many they are the reason your other team members laugh at lunchtime. They’re the reasons your team chooses to socialize on a Friday night, and everyone looks forward to hearing their next entertaining story. He or she will be one of the reasons that others love their work so take note of this team player and harness their contribution.
Metric 5: Profile
Success breeds success and I think one of the best examples of a group of individuals coming together and building something bigger than themselves individually is the British cycling team. They have used their overall team performance to push their individual standards up. This then raises the bar for new team prospects applying and it fosters a healthy competitive spirit amongst existing team members. We all desire to be part of something that’s amazing. After all, it’s cool to tell your mates that you’re part of the next success story or the company that everyone wants to be a part of.
So, as you can see there can be many dynamics that come together to allow a team to perform and it is important as a manger or business owner that we consider all angles when measuring a team’s success. Each individual will naturally contribute with a lower or higher emphasis on each of the above metrics. The important thing though is that each team member is bringing something unique to the table and if they are not then they are probably holding the team back and your company, too.
