Important Metrics to Consider When Hiring IT Professionals
Hiring IT professionals requires more than just verifying someone’s coding skills. The tech industry moves fast, and making the wrong hire can cost your company time, money, and productivity. Proactive employers track specific metrics during the hiring process to make informed decisions and build stronger teams.
The right metrics not only help you key in on the hiring process but show you where to improve and help you find the best candidates faster. When you measure the right things, you can spot problems early and fix them before they become expensive mistakes.
Time to Fill and Time to Hire
Time to fill measures how long it takes from when you post a job until someone accepts your offer. This is significant because it not only affects productivity downtime but also the ability to get an accepted offer from a strong candidate. You will lose your best talent if your process is too slow, and another, quicker company hires them first.
The time to hire differs. This refers to how long potential hires spend in your hiring process after applying. These two numbers indicate if your process is one in which you can achieve the best possible talent promptly.
Most IT jobs need to be filled in 30 to 45 days. Streamline if you take longer than this. Review each step and ask if this step has any real value. Remove unnecessary interviews and speed up round decisions.
Quality of Hire
Quality of hire measures the new hire’s performance once you’ve hired them. It’s an aggregate of many different measurements, such as job performance evaluations, employee retention in your company, and managerial assessments.
You can gauge this by looking at six-month and one-year performance reviews. Effective hires will be at or above expectations in the first year. They will be a proper cultural fit for your team and will be contributing members to projects.
Poor quality hire manifests as poor performance, turnover, or complaints from other workers. Reexamine your interviewing process and assessment methods whenever you see these patterns develop.
Technical Skills Assessment Accuracy
Not all technical assessments are created equal. You need to measure how accurately your tests simulate real work performance. The best tests simulate real work conditions rather than coding brain teasers.
Track the in-job performance of high-scoring candidates. When high-scoring candidates don’t succeed in the job, this indicates that your tests aren’t measuring the right things. A good test must predict job performance 70% or more of the time.
Attempt to use real work-related coding challenges that reflect your own work setting. Let prospective applicants use the equipment and tools they will be utilizing on the job. This will lead to a better evaluation of what they can really do.
Cost Per Hire
Cost per hire entails each dollar that you spend to make a hire. This involves job posting expenses on job boards, recruiter time, interview expenses, background checks, and other hiring-related costs. To establish this measure, divide your hiring expense by the number of individuals you hire.
IT professionals are generally more expensive to hire than other positions, but you need to know if you’re getting your money’s worth. Track spending by hiring source and by position. Some sources will be expensive but provide higher-quality candidates. Others will be cheap but waste time on poor fits.
The average recruitment cost for IT personnel varies between $6,000 and $12,000, depending on the position level. Senior developers and specialized professionals cost more but yield a higher value to your company.
Source of Hire Effectiveness
You will find different results from different recruitment sources. Track where your best-performing recruits originate and focus there. Referrals from your current workforce will provide high-quality recruits with higher tenure and performance.
Job boards, LinkedIn, recruitment agencies, and university agreements each possess strengths. You need to measure not just the number of applicants these sources bring in but also the number of them who become long-term employees.
Sources may refer to numerous applications but few qualified applicants, while others may refer to fewer applications but with a higher success rate. To measure your recruitment sources numerically, consider measuring the quality rather than the number.
Offer Acceptance Rate
Your offer acceptance rate reflects how much your offers resonate with prospective candidates. When good candidates keep turning down your offers, determine the reasons why. Low offer acceptance wastes time and gives competitors an edge by poaching people you need to hire.
Monitor by role level, experience level, and candidate source. Senior developers will have different expectations than junior developers, and the candidate sources will incentivize them differently.
Some reasons for offer rejection include low salary, poor benefits, no clear career growth, or poor interview experiences. Performing exit interviews with rejecting applicants can enable you to identify and fix these issues.
Interview-to-Hire Ratio
This metric gauges the number of interviews needed for each hire. A high ratio means either your screen isn’t very good or your interview questions aren’t forecasting job success.
It takes 3 to 6 interviews before a hire is made for most IT organizations. You will probably waste your time interviewing potential hires who will never work out if you interview a much larger number. You will leave the evaluation incomplete if you interview smaller numbers.
Once again, review each step of the interview and determine its effectiveness. Phone screenings should weed out unsuitable candidates. Technical screening should identify skill gaps. Final interviews can validate cultural fit and motivation.
First-Year Retention Rate
First-year retention refers to the rate of new workers working at your firm for at least 12 months. First-year turnover tends to show a problem with your hiring process, onboarding process, or employment expectations.
In most instances, employees who resign after a short time report mismatched expectations, inadequate onboarding, or limited opportunities. Monitor why job leavers depart and tackle the most frequent reasons.
Your first-year IT employee retention percentages must be greater than 85%. If yours aren’t, review your interviewing and onboarding process and job descriptions. Make sure the candidates know what they’re signing up for.
Candidate Experience Scores
Candidate experience affects your employer’s brand and future talent attraction. Bad experiences get posted on social media and review sites, and will ultimately make future hiring of quality talent challenging.
Survey prospective applicants regardless of whether or not you hire them. Get input on communication, interview process, and general impressions. This will help refine your process.
Positive candidate experiences entail clear communication, respectful behavior, timely responses, and open processes. Your company must be talked about positively by even rejected applicants.
Hiring Manager Satisfaction
Your hiring managers interact with new hires regularly and can give you a sense of whether or not the hiring process is producing quality. Ask them regularly to offer feedback on candidate quality and process effectiveness.
Happy hiring managers will be more actively involved and make good decisions. Dissatisfied hiring managers might make hasty decisions or not make hires at all.
Survey hiring managers on the quality of the interviews, the preparedness of the candidates, and whether the new hires lived up to expectations. Use the data to refine your process and training.
Time to Productivity
Time to productivity refers to the time spent by recruits to be completely productive in their new position. This varies by role complexity and your onboarding system, but measuring it helps estimate the actual hiring cost.
IT professionals take 3 to 6 months to reach full productivity, depending on the company and role complexity. Faster time to productivity means smarter hiring decisions and onboarding.
Track milestones such as successful project completion, work done independently, and contribution to group goals. Apply this data to refine onboarding programs and recruitment standards.
Assessment Tool Effectiveness
If you do use coding tests, technical interviews, or other measurement tools, measure how well they forecast job success. Tools lacking a correlation with performance waste everyone’s time.
Compare performance appraisal ratings and assessment results. Valid measuring instruments will indicate a positive correlation between job success and test performance; if not, adopt a different measure.
The technical assessments highlight field-based problem resolution and practical ability over abstract algorithms. They must replicate the field conditions and equipment your team works with.
Making Data-Driven Hiring Decisions
Gathering metrics is useless if you do nothing with them. You must review your hiring metrics every month and identify trends and patterns. Then, share the results with your hiring team and discuss ways to improve.
Set targets for each measure regarding industry standards and your business goals—track changes with time and reward when performance increases. When performance decreases, check for problems right away and fix them.
Utilize your metrics in constructing the business case for process simplification in hiring. Illustrate how enhanced metrics lead to enhanced hiring, cost reductions, and improved team performance.
Building Your Metrics Dashboard
You don’t have to measure everything at once. Identify the most important ones in your case. Choose 5-7 key measures and work on improving them before introducing any extra ones.
Use your applicant tracking system or hiring software to automate data capture as much as possible. Manual capture takes too much time and generates mistakes. A good tool will enable metrics to be easily tracked and analyzed.
Create simple dashboards to show the trend over time. Share them with stakeholders so there’s a shared understanding of how hiring performance affects business results.
Transforming Your IT Hiring Process
Hiring metrics will inform the decisions you make in the hiring process. With the proper measurements in mind, you can design a hiring process that correctly identifies and attracts the best IT talent.
Adopt these steps one by one and use the results to refine your recruitment process. Good metrics lead to good hires, resulting in good teams and business performance.
Want help to boost your hiring with data-based recruiting of high-quality candidates? Hunter Recruiting specializes in guiding companies in creating world-class IT teams with strategic hiring and vetted candidate screening.
Our technology staffing solutions are in tune with the nuances of IT recruitment and put the right procedures in place to find top talent. Contact us today and learn how our expertise can transform your technical recruitment success and create the IT team your company needs to thrive.
