Our friends at Staffing.org have released their 2006 Staffing Performance Report on staffing metrics. Its a good read for anyone trying to get benchmarks and many other interesting data.

For years we supported their emphasis on quality of hire; it should be the #1 metric that any organization measures. However, today only 40% of organizations have some measure of quality.
I wont speak more about this as we already push enough hire quality on this blog: here.

There are other great metrics that add a bit more context and meaning, including a new way to calculate cost per hire. This better approach is to make a ratio out of it and divide the cost per hire by the average compensation recruited. This gives the recruited cost ratio. This year it is 14.8% with about an equal spilt between internal and external spend. The ratio varies greatly by industry from about 8% to about 23%.

The only metric we do not fully support is the way they measure time to start and prefer to make a ratio out of it. The ratio is actual time to start divided by contracted time to start. Why dont I support it fully? Because most of the requisitions are needed tomorrow. And if it can be good to set the expectation to the hiring manager for a specific time (as we have seen with a couple of organizations), it lowers the expectation for the recruiting department. What they see as success is to meet the expectation, not to go as fast as they can.