7 Hiring Metrics You Should Be Tracking at the Entry Level

Hiring any new team member is an investment. But hiring entry-level employees who often require additional training and adjustment periods is its own category, and there are specific entry-level hiring metrics that every talent team should be tracking. 

With specific measurements of how successful the organization is at recruiting and retaining entry-level employees, managers can better tailor their recruitment, training, and onboarding procedures. This leads to lower turnover and can save the organization significant amounts of money and time in recruiting and training new employees. To improve your ROI for entry-level hires, here are seven metrics your company should be tracking at the entry-level:

Cost-Per-Hire by Recruiting Methods

Cost-per-hire metrics based on various forms of recruiting are vital to record. You might recruit at career fairs or through different types of technology (LinkedIn, Facebook advertising, job websites, trade association websites, an app for applicants specific to your company, etc.). You might invest in sourcing tools or even internship programs as your main recruiting methods. Whichever recruiting strategies are your dominant ones, you should understand how they’re performing.

When you can see how much it costs your organization to hire entry-level workers through various means, you can make decisions about whether certain methods of recruiting need to be scaled back, eliminated, or improved. While having an average “cost-per-hire” number gives you an idea of your overall spend, it makes it difficult to make any decisions to improve efficiency or invest in the methods that produce more quality hires. 

Once you have figured out the cost-per-hire by method, be sure to analyze the cost alongside other metrics, like retention rates. You may find that the cheapest recruiting methods aren’t producing candidates that your company retains, or that unexpected methods produce long-term hires. 

Time-to-Hire

While paying attention to the cost of hiring individual candidates through various recruitment methods is certainly important, so is the amount of time that it takes for an entry-level worker to be hired. Does it take weeks or months to get them interested in the company from their first interaction with the organization? How many interviews are they going through? When you track the time it takes to hire applicants you will be able to see where the hiring process could potentially be streamlined. 

You might be losing candidates due to an onerous process that simply takes too long to compete compared to your competitors. Even if your company is offering more money, better work-life balance and perks, when a new graduate is looking for a job, they may take a job at an organization that is less desirable just because that company beat them to the punch. In fact, RippleMatch’s 2019 report (The State of the Gen Z Job Search) uncovered that more than half of entry-level candidates will accept the first job offer they receive. Gen Z candidates are used to quick processes and may have several offers to choose from, so they will lose patience if your technology and decision-making is slow and outdated.

Offer Acceptance Rates

How many of the applicants that you offer positions to actually accept the offer? Even more specifically, how many applicants from different recruitment channels accept their offers? Think about breaking down the acceptance rates by former interns, students from career fairs, and students who cold-apply to the organization. 

With this information, you can dig more deeply into why they accepted their positions. Was it because of a particular relationship they developed with a great recruiter? Was it because of the solid information on the company and the opportunity to interview at a career fair? You can poll the employees about their application experience to find out exactly what is going well and not so well in each recruitment channel. 

For more tips on increasing your offer acceptance rates, read our article here. 

Intern Return Rate

Do you know how many of your interns receive offers to hire on at the organization after their internship ends? If it is a low percentage, it would be worth considering taking a closer look at the internship program’s acceptance rates itself. What sort of students is the company taking on as interns? 

You could go a bit further and find out how many interns actually accept their offers, as mentioned above. Was their internship experience what they thought it would be? Do they feel it prepared them to work in your industry or in the position they’re most interested in?

Quality Candidate Rate

How many entry-level candidates pass the initial phone screen with your organization? Consider what AIHR refers to as the selection ratio. Knowing how many people make it past the first hurdle in each form of recruitment your organization can help you improve the targeting of qualified candidates. A ton of applicants shows a ton of people are seeing the posting, but reviewing this metric will help determine if they are the right candidates. 

Another way to analyze this is to consider how many of your past entry level candidates are growing in their careers with your company. If you hire classes of new graduates each year, what percentage of those have been promoted? This will tell you if you have been hiring quality candidates with the potential to make your company better. 

First-Year Employee Retention Rate

Knowing how many employees stuck with the organization for more than 12 months after they were hired is essential to a company’s hiring and recruitment practice. If the organization is experiencing high turnover rates, it is critical to know precisely why. The problems may involve the recruitment and application process, training procedures, promotion rates, and many other aspects of the organization. 

One report from Work Institute in 2017 found that “it costs as much as 33% of a worker’s annual salary to replace.” If an employee has a salary of $45,000, the cost averages to be $15,000 to hire a new employee. With those numbers, it’s critical for a business to know why its employees are leaving after a year as well as to know why certain candidates are staying on year after year.

Diversity Metrics

To improve the diversity of your team, it’s important to track diversity metrics at various stages of the hiring pipeline. From the application process to the interview stage, understanding the demographics present in each stage of the process can reveal if and where there are barriers to building a balanced team. 

Consider adding an EEO question to your application if you don’t already have one. While U.S. federal government contractors are required to collect EEO data for OFCCP compliance purposes, other companies can still collect EEO data to track and measure diversity and inclusion program results. Start with questions on gender, race/ethnicity, and disability status.  If you already collect this as part of the application, start reviewing the data and see how you compare to your industry. 

Once you begin the interview process, start tracking what demographics look like as the stages progress. If you start with a 50% female-to-male ratio in the phone screening stage but drop to 25% female at the final-decision-making stage, that may be an area to investigate.

Diversity metrics are important to track once employees are on board as well. Take a look at your employee headcount regularly to determine if you are increasing or decreasing in any areas. If you notice that your retention in certain areas is poor, there may be an issue with your company culture, learning & development programs, or even specific managers. 

Paying attention to the numbers behind your recruitment efforts will go a long way. By digging deeper into the facts and figures around entry-level recruitment and hiring, your organization can hire more qualified candidates and better allocate the resources it spends on sourcing, hiring, and training.

Erin is an HR professional and the owner of Career Designs, a website dedicated to helping people level up their careers. She has over 9 years of experience in Human Resources and has worked in just about every area. She began her career in recruiting and spent years traveling the southeast to find the best and brightest talent to join the internship and graduate programs for a global investment bank. After campus recruitment, she moved into a Business Advisory position where she counseled managers on everything from hiring, employee development, promotion, training, and termination. Currently she works in Employee Relations, where she investigates complaints related to harassment and discrimination policy violations. Connect with Erin on her website or LinkedIn!

Want to know how Gen Z candidates are faring during COVID-19? Download our report here to understand how employment was affected during the onset of COVID-19, and download our report The Gen Z Job Seeker to understand how this generation's approach to the job search has fundamentally changed.