Does your organisation have a recruitment strategy, or do you recruit reactively? No matter what your approach is, if you’re not measuring how you recruit, you’re never going to improve your workforce.

Whilst any good recruitment system will track your recruitment performance, most HRIS or org charting tools will also give you some keen insights into how effective your strategy really is.

Based on Ian Cook’s data driven HR strategy, here are the 5 metrics every recruiter needs to measure to craft a winning recruitment strategy:

1. Qualified applicants per advertised position

Are you getting enough people responding to your ads? This one’s dead easy to track, but says a lot about your recruitment channels and position descriptions.

At a more basic level, it’s important to understand whether your recruitment strategy is going to fill all of the existing gaps within your organisation. Be on the lookout for vacant positions on your org charts and positions that will become vacant soon (nearing retirement age or gearing up for a promotion for example).

If you’re not getting the quantity of applicants you need, try starting your job search before the role becomes vacant, building a pipeline of quality candidates ready to hire.

2. Offer acceptance rate

How many of your offers are actually accepted by candidates? 50%? 90%?

If you’re having offers turned down by candidates, chances are you’re either a) not attracting the right people for the role or b) giving a bad first impression as an employer.

Make sure you’re clear, open and honest about the sort of person you’re looking for to improve this rate.

You’ll also need to manage your onboarding process to make sure your offers are being delivered to your candidates quickly, easily and with the right information for them to make their decision.

3. Resignations & Involuntary turnover within first 3 months

If you’re losing new candidates in the first 3 months, it’s generally going to be because of your culture or they just don’t fit the role.

Cultural problems can be thorny, but more importantly, you’ve got to hire people who are a good fit for not just the position itself but also your work environment.

A high turnover rate can be extremely costly too, both in terms of cost to hire but also the cost to onboard each employee.

4. New hire performance by projected performance

The gap between expected performance and actual performance should always be small (unless they’re overperforming, in which case you’ve been very lucky!).

Using org charting software, you can quickly identify performance low performers with visual ‘alarms’. If they’re performing lower than expected, chances are you’ve got a problem with your training and onboarding process or have simply hired the wrong person for the job.

5. Vacancy rate

Unless your organisation is downsizing significantly, a high vacancy rate indicates that you’re not recruiting fast enough for the right positions.

The core issue could be employee turnover, not enough recruitment, a lack of succession planning or a combination of all of these factors.

With all of these metrics, the first step is really about setting a benchmark. Every industry (and organisation) is different, so you need to work out what the norm is for your particular team.

From there, you can look to improve specific metrics by adjusting your recruitment approach. By the same token, if any of these metrics get worse, you’ll know there’s a problem that needs addressing.