Measuring the ROI of Your Early Career Strategy

Having good data to power decision-making is more important now than ever — especially in the field of talent acquisition. That’s because even though top companies might be continuing to hire entry-level candidates and interns in 2023, the uncertain macroeconomy is causing early career recruitment teams to shift their priorities and refocus on high-impact efforts. And it takes data to understand what exactly those efforts should be. The benefit of collecting the right data to showcase the ROI of your team’s recruitment efforts is twofold; it will help you make the case to leadership for why early career is a good investment, and, with the pressure on leaner teams to do more with less, it will help you focus on the strategies that are actually working. But where do you begin?

What to Measure (& How)

There are many metrics that you should consider tracking to help determine the ROI of your recruitment efforts, and they will differ by your company’s specific goals and needs. However, below are some metrics that are universally important to incorporate into the overall picture of your early career efforts, and how you can work toward calculating them.

Cost-Per-Hire by Recruiting Methods

Understanding your cost-per-hire by the various forms of recruitment your team uses is crucial for making decisions about whether certain recruitment methods need to be scaled back, eliminated, or, on the other hand, utilized more often. For example, it’s important that you take note of how attending large-scale recruitment events, participating in local career fairs, and leveraging technology (like RippleMatch, LinkedIn, Facebook Advertising, or other job websites) compare when it comes to securing top candidates. One way to do so is to divide the number of hires from one channel either over a certain amount of time or from one event, by the cost of that effort.  

Once you have figured out your cost-per-hire by method, you should be sure to analyze that data alongside other metrics, like retention rates. You may discover that the least expensive recruiting methods aren’t producing employees that stick around, or that unexpected methods result in those long-term hires. 

First-Year Employee Retention Rates

Knowing how many employees stuck with your organization for more than one year is essential to understanding the strength of your company overall. That’s because if you find that your organization is experiencing high turnover rates, you can put yourself in a good position to identify problems that might be occurring within the recruitment and application process, training procedures, promotion rates, and many other aspects of the organization — and to propose solutions. Plus, as you make the case for improvements, you can demonstrate how you’ll be saving the company money in the long-run — as it costs more to hire someone new than retain your current workers.  

Diversity of Hires

As companies continue to prioritize diversity in the workplace, it’s important that you understand how new hires are contributing to your organization’s overall goals of a more inclusive workplace, or if that progress is being hindered. From the application process to the interviewing stage to advancing within the company, tracking how traditionally underrepresented candidates move through your hiring pipeline will help you highlight if there is a specific point where they might be dropping off. If you don’t already have one, you may want to consider adding an EEO question to your application to get an idea of the make-up of initial applicants. Once candidates begin the hiring process, you’ll also want to track how they fare from phone screen to hire. For example, if during one recruiting season the candidates that are put through phone screens are 50% female and 50% male, but by the time they reach the final interview that switches from 10% female and 90% male, you’ll want to learn why. 

Quality of Employees

Another important aspect of making the case for early career talent to leadership is showcasing the quality of employees that your programs and efforts are bringing into the company. You can measure this through manager performance reviews, and by tracking how these hires advance throughout the company. It’s also crucial for your own knowledge to understand if your recruiting efforts are bringing in quality candidates, which you can start tracking by comparing the number of applicants to a role to how many make it to the phone screen or first-round interview, and which channels those candidates are coming from. That can help identify where exactly you are finding the best-fit candidates, and will allow you to double down on those channels. 

What Tools Can Help

As you can see, data should be a key informant to your early career strategy. However, it can be extremely difficult to collect and keep track of all of that data (and more!) through an ATS — and to find a way to present what matters to leadership and to your team. However, there are tools at your disposal that present you with the data that matters in a digestible way, such as RippleMatch. In fact, RippleMatch makes data collection easy — allowing you to measure the impact of your efforts with an intuitive user interface. With RippleMatch, you can analyze and compare data from different recruiting seasons and across various marketing efforts, which can, for example, provide you with what you need to determine the ROI of each of your recruitment events. That’s because RippleMatch can answer questions from ‘which events are helping us reach the most diverse audiences?’ to ‘which applicant sources are getting us the most diverse candidates?’

These are turbulent times, and you need to be focusing your efforts on those that are bringing in the best candidates for your company. Plus, data collection can allow you to cut costs in the long-run — a large focus in this current economic climate — because you’ll be able to identify the poorest performing programs or techniques, and replace them with scalable, cost-efficient ones. For example, you might find that attending large-scale conferences are not resulting in many quality hires, despite their expensive price tags. As you continue to strategize how to make better choices about your early career strategy, don’t forget that data is your friend — and there are tools to help you put it to action.