If you’re an In-House Recruitment Manager, daily tasks can be fairly demanding. You may feel as if you are constantly looking at how to drive down recruitment costs, and introduce improvements.

But where should you begin?

When starting your job at a new company, you may be hesitant to completely change their recruitment procedures, especially with targets to hit. So how should you go about improving in-house recruitment?

Start with looking at how the company seeks to attract candidates. In order to streamline the recruitment process, an in-depth audit can be used to look at how staff are recruited and candidate attraction strategies.

Webrecruit Ireland have calculated the top 5 metrics you need to help you recruit staff efficiently and in a cost effective way:

1. Overall time to hire

Time is a critical element in recruitment; It really does equate to money, and the longer the business takes to hire, the bigger effect on cost it will have.

Time-to-hire can be calculated by noting the time between the date you advertise your vacancy to the date the new hire starts within the business. To get a good overview of this metric, do it for a variety of different roles depending on your recruitment volume and take the average.

Looking for methods to reduce your time to hire can be extremely beneficial to your business, by improving efficiency of your direct recruitment processes.

2. Overall cost to hire

Cost to hire can be calculated by noting the cost of each recruitment campaign – from advertisement rates to the cost for a hiring manager carrying out interviews.

Again, look at the average cost over a number of positions – this is your cost to hire figure.

3. Cost to hire per job board

This allows you to be more particular in your auditing process, adding to the overall cost to hire.

The likelihood is that you use several job boards to advertise your vacancies. You need to be sure, however, that you are getting the best value for money from your selection.

Note the monthly cost of each job board you are using, before dividing it by the number of hires you have made using that particular board. By working out your cost to hire per board, you can eradicate any boards that are not performing as expected and, in turn, reduce your overall cost to hire.

4. Recruitment Source

The source of your applications is an important metric which can identify where the main bulk of your applications are coming from – including those of quality.

For numbers based solely on volume, divide the total number of applications for each vacancy by the number of applicants from each source. The source could include LinkedIn, your talent pool, referrals, different job boards etc.

If you want to look purely at the quality applications, divide the number of applicants that have been hired over the past 12 months by the number of those shortlisted from each source. If you have a large number of applications for a role, but none are suitable, then it may be worth re-considering for your recruitment.

5. Social media conversions

You need to know whether candidates are clicking through on jobs that are advertised through your social media pages. Even if you have a large number of followers, this doesn’t show how effective they are for promoting your vacancy.

Note your number of click throughs for each social media platform, and divide this by your number of followers to get a true indication of engagement. You will then get an insight in to which platform requires more of your time and candidate attraction efforts.

Are you looking at developing your direct recruitment strategy? Check out our free eBook, the In-House Direct Sourcing Guide.