4 Quantitative Talent Metrics You Should be Tracking in 2021

Many organisations tend to focus heavily on their business output—sales, revenue, and so on. However, it is the people hired that have the biggest impact on a company’s bottom line. For this reason, employers will benefit greatly by paying close attention to their internal talent metrics. Talent metrics are essential to attracting, engaging, and ultimately holding on to the right people for your business. Moreover, with diversity, equity, and inclusion becoming a board-level priority for organisations across the country, employers can, and should, get creative in setting up meaningful ways to apply these talent metrics to their DE&I goals.

What Are Talent Metrics?

When people think about talent, they usually think of talent acquisition, the step where companies hire employees. However, a successful talent-focused company will look at the full talent spectrum from sourcing, interviewing, offer acceptance, and onboarding through to exit. You can gather data across the whole employment lifecycle to really dig into, not only how your talent function is performing, but any key challenges within your organisation’s talent strategy. Here are three talent metrics that will get you started.

Time-to-Fill

Time-to-fill refers to the number days taken to hire for a vacant role, starting at the day the job posting is created. This is an effective metric for assessing process efficiencies at various steps of the talent cycle, as well as the overall productiveness of your recruiting team. The time-to-fill for a given role can be calculated using the formula below:

For example: You advertise an open role on March 5, 2021. After sourcing, interviewing, and extending an offer to a candidate, they accept the offer on April 17, 2021. Your time-to-fill for that role is 43 days.

So, why is time-to-fill important? A long time-to-fill can create a barrier to securing quality candidates. A recent survey by Robert Half reported that 62% of job seekers lose interest if they don't hear back from an employer within two weeks after the first interview. This percentage rises to 77% if they aren't provided with a status update within three weeks.

Source: Robert Half, The Biggest Mistake You’re Making When Hiring

A long time-to-fill may indicate a need for improved sourcing and engagement techniques, a readjustment of your employer brand, and process efficiencies at the interview coordination, hiring manager review, and candidate selection stages.

Offer Acceptance Rate

Offer acceptance rate shows the percentage of candidates that accepted your job offer. Calculate your company's offer acceptance rate for a select period using the formula below:

For example, if you made 8 offers in March 2021, and 3 of those offers were accepted, then your offer acceptance rate for that month is 37.5%.

A low offer acceptance rate suggests that you are having trouble getting the right candidates to work for you. This also means that you are losing out on top performers and likely taking longer to secure candidates for open roles.

 Source: SHRM, How to Prevent Rejected Job Offers

Often, offer acceptance rate is tied closely to employer value proposition (EVP), candidate experience, and your organisation’s overall ability to effectively address the priorities, needs, and concerns of job seekers—especially when it comes to compensation and benefits. As such, a low offer acceptance rate prompts further analysis into your candidate experience, candidate communication, employer branding, and ability to offer competitive salary and benefits. Consider sending candidate experience surveys to candidates who accepted your offer, as well as those who did not, to gain further insight.

Organisations prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives can benefit from reviewing offer acceptance rates across demographics to determine if offer acceptance is lower for some groups than others. Low offer acceptance rates among minority groups may benefit from a revisit of your DE&I strategy to make your commitment to DE&I more apparent throughout the talent cycle.

Employee Turnover and Employee Retention

Employee turnover is the percentage of new employees that resign within a defined timeframe, and is often calculated on a quarterly or monthly basis. Calculate by dividing the number of employees who resigned voluntarily during a pre-determined period by the average number of employees in that period, then multiply the result by 100.

For example: In March 2021 you had a total of 90 employees. That month, you had 3 voluntary resignations, leaving you with 87 employees. Your employee turnover for March 2021 was therefore 3.39%.

Employee retention rate refers to the percentage of hires that remain with the organisation in a defined period. Calculate by dividing by the number of employees remaining at the end of this period by the number of employees at the start of the period. Multiply the result by 100.

For example: At the beginning of March 2021 you had a total of 90 employees. That month, you had 3 voluntary resignations, leaving you with 87 employees. Your employee retention for March 2021 was therefore 96.67%.

Losing top performers at high rates, or failing to retain them, can be detrimental to an organisation. Critical skills can be both costly and difficult to replace, and the loss of these employees could disrupt team productivity amongst their direct reports. Not to mention the loss of intellectual capital which can affect client relations, sales opportunities, goal achievement and so on.

 A low employee retention rate and high voluntary turnover rate can indicate poor employee experience and employee satisfaction. It points toward a need for flexible leadership, new ways of addressing employee concerns, and competitive deals. Exit interviews, employee satisfaction surveys, and company reviews can all provide further insight into various factors—stress, diversity concerns, workplace conflict, job content, compensation and benefits, etc.— that are driving quality talent away from your organisation.

 Source: Deloitte, Talent 2020: Surveying the Talent Paradox from the Employee Perspective

Source: Deloitte, Talent 2020: Surveying the Talent Paradox from the Employee Perspective

For companies prioritizing DE&I, employee turnover and retention should also be tracked across female employees and underrepresented groups to determine if your work environment, employee experience, and career opportunities are conducive to those individuals.

Where Do I Start?

When it comes to tracking talent metrics, there’s an abundance of data that you can collect. Companies can start by identifying existing issues that need to be solved, such as a slow hiring process or high number of resignations. Once you have identified a few key areas to focus on, you can build out which data points you want to collect, how you’ll collect them, and to which stakeholders you’ll present the data to in order to influence the required changes. Deciding on which talent metrics to track can seem overwhelming at first, but as you continue identifying what you want to achieve, you can gradually add new metrics to gain a deeper understanding of your talent lifecycle and strategies.