Recruiter Conversion Rate: The KPI You Need to Look At

When you’re managing a team of recruiters it's all too easy to think that your top biller is also your top performing recruiter. Revenue is of course important, but it's also important to look at who is the most effective in their market. The easiest way to do this is by looking at your recruiter’s conversion rates right through from job worked, to job filled. Once you have this information, you can use it to identify key opportunities to improve your recruitment process.

What is job-conversion rate?

Job conversion rate is the percentage of successful placements made from the total jobs worked by a recruiter. It can be worked out like this:

(I’ve created a tool that calculates these conversion rates for you. Available to download below)

The higher the conversion rate, the better. This means that you are getting a bigger return on all time invested by your recruiter. A recruiter who successfully fills the majority of jobs that they are working, for example, is more effective than one who fills a lower percentage of jobs that they are working. Even if the lower percentage recruiter bills more.

It's really important to compare like-for-like when looking at the different recruiter performance across your team. Someone working on the temp desk is expected to have a higher conversion rate than someone working perm, so you should avoid comparisons between the two. If they are working mixed desks, on the other hand, a comparison will be useful.

Once you have all the results from across your team, compare them and work out an average. This average will then allow you to come up with an achievable target for your recruiters, and a consistent standard to assess them with.

How to identify your top performers

It’s likely that once you have the conversion rates for all of your recruiters some of them will stand out as being particularly higher or lower than everyone else. If it’s not immediately obvious what the differences are between these recruiters and the rest, then you should take the next step and use the data you’ve collected to drill down and identify what is separating your top performers from those falling behind. Once again you need to identify conversion rates for these recruiters, but in much more detail.

Some key conversion rates to identify include:

• % of CVs sent out after a candidate is interviewed by a recruiter
• % of interviews booked after a CV is sent
• % of client interviews that result in a placement

You can work out these detailed conversion rates using the same method as for job conversion rate. The only difference is your initial calculation:

Once you have the conversion rates for each of the above, you can begin to draw useful conclusions. A low conversion rate in one area will identify a very different challenge than another, so make sure you know what each conversion rate gives insight on. For example:

• If a recruiter has a poor overall jobs/placement conversion rate, but gets a really high conversion rate from recruiter interview to CV sent, that suggests they need to brush up on their interview technique.  
• If a recruiter has a low client interview to placement rate and low overall job to placement rate, this could suggest that they are not properly understanding the client brief. 
• If their conversion rates are low across the board compared to others on your team then it could be time to consider if they are right for the job.
• If their conversion rates are high across the board but the overall volume is low. It may be the case that they are a good recruiter, but in the wrong market. 

By considering your recruiter’s conversion rates, you can better identify the challenges facing your business and also which areas individual recruiters need to improve in. The real beauty of conversion rates is they can be as detailed or simple as you need.

Want to play around with conversion rates more? Check out our free tool download below and find out who your true top performers are. The only information you need is the total number of recruiter interviews, CVs sent, client interviews and placements made for each of your recruiters.

Image Credit: Otu Eletu