The Best Talent Acquisition KPI?

Author

Joe Atkinson
January 19, 2024

Talent acquisition has moved towards making decisions on facts not feelings, also known as being data-driven.

With more and more key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep an eye on, which ones can tell us this most? And importantly, how can internal recruiters turn metrics into positive actions?

1. Good KPIs vs Great KPIs

Tali Treivish Ashkenazy has led recruitment teams at Meta & Apple and has seen that most recruiters focus on effectiveness KPIs. These help us understand if we’re getting the right people into (top of funnel) and through (hiring) the process, examples include:

  • Time to Fill

  • Source to Hire

  • Offer Acceptance Rate

  • Candidate Satisfaction

The purpose of talent acquisition KPIs are to make sure our recruitment process is effective and efficient

The best recruiters also closely monitor efficiency KPIs. These tell us if we are using our resources in the best way, or if we can be working smarter. Examples include:

  • Pass Through Rates

  • Sourcing Channel Effectiveness

  • Profile Attributes

  • D&I Pass Through Rates


Below Tali provides a quick overview of each KPI. Understanding the story behind these metrics will have a direct impact on the effectiveness metrics (e.g reducing time to fill) but can also create a wider, positive impact, just like the next examples.

2. Improving Screening Questions

Luke Victor has looked at pass through rates to improve the screening process while leading tech recruiting teams at Freetrade and now Cleo. He analyses the pass through rates of each interview stage, looking for large drop-offs (bottlenecks) which can be fixed by screening candidates more effectively.

A simplified step-by-step of the method:

  1. Look at pass through rates for each interview

  2. Find the interview stage with the largest drop off

  3. Track the themes for failure & find the top problems

  4. Feed this back into the screening stage

  5. Track improvements & iterate

3. Creating a More Equitable Process

More great advice from Tali; track overall pass through rates AND pass through rates for diversity groups. Your pass through for a certain stage might look fine overall, but then show a significant drop-off for a particular group which should be addressed.

For example, you see a large drop off for female candidates in a stage assessing leaderships skills. Some potential actions:

  • Speak to interviewers to deep dive into failure reasons

  • Gather feedback from candidates on the stage

  • Review the questions, tasks and preparations process

  • Help candidates to prepare in different ways

  • Interviewer bias training

This is just a scratch on the surface on the power of pass through rates. Check out our other blogs for more insight on talent acquisition KPIs and taking action with data. Or find out more about our dedicated courses below.