KPIs – key performance indicators – are a cornerstone of any outbound sales or recruitment team. It’s been proven time and time again that setting a framework for recruiters to work to enables a business to scale rapidly and predictably.
But what does this framework look like? We hear these same few questions quite a lot in our line of business:
– “What are your other clients tracking?”
– “What do you recommend for a CVs/interviews target?”
– “What are your other clients showing on their TV displays?”
They’re all great questions as people like to replicate success and/or understand what the rest of the market is doing. After all, it’s very easy to paralyse your business with data.
Thus, rather than measuring anything and everything, more and more business owners are moving towards picking the right metrics the first time round, and building their business with these at the centre of it all.
Honing your attention on specific, relevant KPIs are fundamental to the performance of your agency. Doing so gives each of your individual recruiters the focus and targeted motivation they need to succeed, keeps the reporting process streamlined, and ensures you can create transparency around the right numbers.
It's time to eliminate the noise and put aside the irrelevant distractions.
To that end, we’ve crunched data generated by 35 of our most active (and most successful) clients to understand which activities agencies are measuring performance against.
These businesses range in size from 3 people all the way up to over 220 so there are learning points here for everyone.
Here are your top 5 recruitment KPIs:
1st and 2nd: CVs Sent and Interviews Booked
When clients ask us what most other agencies prioritise when it comes to targets, CVs and interviews are the two no-brainers. Together, they touch every aspect of the recruitment journey. 24 of our 35 top clients prioritised these two metrics.
CVs indicate that a candidate has been sourced, a client with a job has been found, and the two have been linked.
Post-connection, interviews then indicate the engagement after that step with solid progress towards a potential hire. For the curious, we most commonly see targets of 10 CVs sent and 3 interviews booked per week.
3rd: Revenue
Revenue is held to slightly higher regard than the number of placements/deals closed. 21 out of 35 of our top clients tracked this metric.
We believe this is because of the nature of different sectors; some close a large number of placements at a lower deal value whilst some close far fewer but all at a much higher value. After all, placements don’t pay the bills – the money does.
4th: Calls
We were slightly surprised to see calls so high on this list at first, but on reflection, it makes perfect sense. In our industry (software), the resourcing role (called an SDR – sales development representative) is commonly targeted with 60 “touch points” per day.
This usually consists of calls but can include emails too. To keep your pipeline busy (and therefore your CVs and interviews flowing), you need to speak to people.
Being phone shy doesn’t help, so over half (18 out of 35) of our surveyed clients turn to the dialler to ensure their consultants were keeping the pipeline moving.
5th: Placements/Deals (16)
Coming in just under calls is the one you may have expected to see in 1st or 2nd. Only 16 out of the 35 top clients we surveyed paid attention to the number of placements and deals made.
As explained above under "Revenue", the variable nature of recruitment puts a little less focus on this KP, but many still use it as a benchmark to see how different members of the same team stack up against one another in terms of deal volume.
Executive search firms used this as a target far less often, as seniority of hires greatly influenced the volume.
Bonus: Jobs Added (14)
As we had a tie for 1st place, we thought we’d include a bonus 6th place metric. 14 out of 35 surveyed clients tracked jobs added. For what it’s worth, 10 clients track candidates added, 9 contacts added and only 5 the number of clients added.
We think this represents the state of recruitment quite well. Some markets like tech are very candidate-scarce, whilst others like construction have an abundance of candidates but fewer jobs. You can collect 1,000,000 candidates if you like – jobs, or the clients behind them, are what pay the money.
There’s no doubt a fair argument for other KPIs based on each individual business, but these top 5 show what most of our clients are doing – we hope it’s been insightful!
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