A recent survey finds organizations intend to double their use of talent acquisition benchmarks during 2018.
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However, the survey also finds unexceptional satisfaction ratings and significant challenges with benchmarks.
About the Research
The survey, which looks specifically at talent acquisition metrics, was conducted by Brightfield Strategies, a workforce analytics and consulting company.
Findings are based responses from 151 organizations, the majority of which are employers. Additionally, it includes a number of responses from staffing agencies, service providers (e.g., RPO), and talent acquisition technology vendors.
When it comes to annual hiring volume, the majority of respondents fall in the “less than 500” category; however, a significant number hire 500 to 5,000 people annually, and respondents also include companies that hire more than 5,000 people annually.
The majority of respondents are based in North America, but respondents include organizations from Asia Pacific, EMEA, Latin America, and global companies as well.
Leveraging Data
Despite their interest in leveraging data, respondents express concern with metric definitions, data quality, and the availability of comparison companies. In addition, satisfaction with their use of existing benchmarks is uninspiring. Overall, nearly 60 percent of the respondents rate their satisfaction a mere 3 out of a high score of 5. Fewer than 3 percent give their satisfaction level the highest rating.
Nevertheless, benchmark usage is expected to increase—significantly. It is projected to explode in Asia Pacific, where benchmarks are in use by only 20 percent of the survey respondents today, growing to 87 percent by the end of the year. In EMEA, benchmark usage is anticipated to more than double, from 23 percent to 50 percent. In North America, benchmarks are currently in use by 43 percent of the respondents, and are expected to reach nearly 80 percent.
“Using talent acquisition benchmarks enables organizations to gain an external perspective about their performance and get ideas for new metrics to help drive performance,” said Michael Benyamin, chief consulting and business development officer at Brightfield Strategies. “The middling satisfaction scores were no surprise given that most benchmarks are based on surveys of varying accuracy and data freshness, and are therefore less accurate and applicable. To get the real picture, organizations need benchmarks based on current, normalized ATS data.”
What Companies Want to Know
The Brightfield survey also finds that quality of hire and recruiter productivity are the most sought-after metrics for future use. At the top of the list of desired predictive models is optimizing the recruiting funnel of candidates to ensure enough candidate flow to achieve target hiring objectives.
Additional survey highlights include:
- The top three initiatives in 2018 are employment branding, proactive sourcing of candidates, and enhanced reporting and analytics.
- The biggest challenges with metrics are data quality and manual activities impacting timely production of reporting, especially for large organizations.
- Speed metrics such as time to fill and time to accept are the most common talent acquisition metrics currently in use.
- Large organizations prioritize hiring manager and candidate satisfaction metrics, while small organizations focus on cost per hire and recruiter productivity.