Most recruitment dashboards track what is easy to count rather than what informs a decision. A useful metric changes what you do next. If a number has never caused you to act differently, it is decoration.
Metrics worth tracking
1. Quality of hire
The hardest to measure and the most important. A workable composite:
- Performance rating at the first review
- Retention at 12 months
- Hiring manager satisfaction at 90 days, on a simple scale
- Time to full productivity
Track it by source, by interviewer and by role. The patterns are often uncomfortable and always useful — some high-volume sources produce consistently weaker hires, and some interviewers consistently pass people who do not work out.
2. Source effectiveness, measured by hires not applications
For each source, track applications, interviews, hires, 12-month retention and cost. A board producing 400 applications and one hire who leaves in six months is a cost, not a channel.
3. Stage conversion rates
The percentage advancing from each stage to the next. This is your diagnostic tool:
- Low application-to-screening — your job description or targeting is attracting the wrong people
- Low screening-to-interview — your screening criteria may be miscalibrated
- Low interview-to-offer — either the bar is unclear or screening is letting through unsuitable candidates
- Low offer-to-acceptance — compensation, process experience, or employer reputation
4. Time to hire, by stage
Already covered in depth elsewhere, but worth restating: the aggregate is useless, the stage breakdown is actionable.
5. Offer acceptance rate
Below about 85% signals a real problem. Investigate by asking declining candidates directly — they will usually tell you, and the answer is almost always compensation, a competing offer that moved faster, or a poor process experience.
6. Candidate experience
Survey everyone, including rejected candidates. Rejected candidates give more honest feedback and they talk publicly about your process. Ask two questions: would you apply again, and would you recommend applying to a friend.
7. Cost per hire
Include agency fees, job board spend, assessment tools, referral bonuses and a reasonable allocation of recruiter time. Use it for budgeting and channel comparison, not as a target to minimise — the cheapest hire is often not the best one.
8. First-year attrition
The clearest signal that something upstream is broken. High first-year attrition means either hiring is selecting wrongly, the role was misrepresented, or onboarding is failing. All three are fixable once you know which.
Metrics to drop
Total applications received. Volume without conversion is noise, and optimising for it makes screening harder.
Number of interviews conducted. Activity, not outcome. More interviews per hire is usually a symptom of poor screening.
Time to fill from posting date. Easily gamed by delaying the posting, and it ignores the approval delay that preceded it.
Making the data trustworthy
- Define each metric precisely in writing, including start and end points
- Pull from one system so numbers reconcile
- Review monthly as a team, not quarterly as a report
- Segment by role family — comparing engineering and support hiring in aggregate hides both
- Keep history, so you can see trend rather than snapshot
