Metrics to Drive your Team to Success
At RockitLaunch, we have the privilege of working with some of the most innovative start-up companies across Latin America and the USA.
After having fulfilled no less than 50 open roles, we usually say "recruiting is not magic; it's math" and we live our days by that sort of mantra. In other words, the meaning of that sentence is deeply engaged with the specific interest that our team has in understanding how many people we would normally need to reach out, attract, interview, present and eventually move through our partners’ recruiting stages to receive the rewarding confirmation that our candidates have been extended an offer.
The fact that the best candidates are usually already taken, combined with the current post-pandemic context where both recruiters and candidates can work from literally anywhere in the world, makes this job a fascinating game for those who want to find the best talent available. In fact, one of the main challenges start-up companies have is to be able to grow their team in an organic but also scalable way.
On the one hand, start-ups are always running against the clock, trying to innovate and present products that are either faster, more cost-effective, more performant, or easier to handle than their rival products. On the other hand, when talking about companies that are starting from scratch, we need to seize the fact that, at the beginning, start-ups only have the prototype of an idea that in theory works and will depend on investors to trust in that idea and sponsor their projects. If that is the case, the company would have the good fortune and also huge responsibility of having a large sum of money that, after some trial period, should be returned.
But how can this goal be reached in time and form, if they have not yet hired the people who will devise and implement the strategy to move forward? How long does it take to find the best talent, at a time when the demand for software engineers has grown exponentially?
Nowadays, the fact that we are able to hire people from anywhere in the world brings both an ideal and a complex scenario, since there is no universal formula for hiring when you are looking in multiple countries with different time zones, different costs of living, and different compensation packages for similar positions. That is why we need to consider many variables in our analysis.
The reality is that there is no right answer to how much time should be spent on each process: quickly filling a vacancy may lead to a wrong hiring decision, but delays in finding candidates may hinder the implementation of the company’s daily activities.
Thus, for the recruiting and hiring talent to be successful, it is necessary to work together with each stakeholder to define the variables of our game. However, in addition to all the widely-known metrics, such as OKRs, KPIs and other ways of analyzing how each component of this work operates, there is something fundamental that the team of recruiters, who work day and night searching for the best talent, must also keep in mind: measuring results is as valuable as looking for and contacting talented people for the roles to be fulfilled.
If you're interested in learning more about the importance of metrics, below you will find some of the metrics we frequently implement to be able to quantify and measure the work of our team:
Time to Fill: It helps us understand the number of calendar days it takes to find and hire new talent. It is calculated by computing the number of days between the formal kick-off and the day the chosen candidate accepts the offer. We find this metric very useful, because it provides us with a realistic view of the time needed to attract and hire a replacement for departing employees.
Time to Hire: It measures the time it takes for someone to move through the hiring process after they’ve applied. This metric provides a solid indicator of how the recruitment team is performing, since a shorter time to hire often enables the team to hire better candidates, preventing the best candidates from being captured by other companies with recruiting processes that do have a short time to hire. This metric also allows us to identify and eventually remove the bottlenecks in a given hiring process, improving as a result the candidate experience.
Offer Acceptance Rate: It is the comparison between the number of candidates who receive an offer and the number of candidates who actually accept it. Whether it is related to the compensation package or to cultural aspects of an organization, a low acceptance rate usually brings to light the variables that need to be improved if we want to carry out the hiring plan in a timely manner.