You have observed a noticeable decline in time to fill vacant jobs, increase in job applications, increase in click rates of job postings on your corporate career site and many other related metrics. Congratulations! So what? What does this mean and why should you care? How do these metrics indicate that what you are doing as a Recruiter is adding more value to the business? What does adding more value to the business mean?
Let’s take a step back
What is the primary goal of the Recruiting function? It’s to attract top talent to the organization. Simple. Why would you want to attract top talent? Perhaps the average per hire long-term performance will be greater. This would translate into higher productivity, which translates to better top 
and bottom line results. Perhaps it’s to positively impact the customer experience, which we know is positively correlated to business results. The list goes on, but the critical point here is what these goals have in common? Thoughts?
They all have a direct impact on the business and the business measures success. Does time to fill metrics do this? Does volume of applicants do this? Do candidate satisfaction results do this? Of course not, yet we keep measuring them and lean on them as a way to demonstrate our value and impact.
Taking one step further
We always talk about “quality of hire”, and this being the true measure of our success yet we have difficulties identifying what quality of hire should measure. What do we typically do? We look at those metrics I mentioned earlier — time to fill, applicant volume, etc… How about this? Isn’t the answer to my questions in the second paragraph (the true impact to the business) the measures of true quality of hire? Of course it is.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably thinking it’s virtually impossible to accurately measure this. This is where I disagree, especially in an age where we have data for everything within our organizations, and we have the ability to access it. All we have to do is connect the data sources — recruiting data to performance data and you WILL see a noticeable trend in how your work impacts the business in a meaningful way.
Note: below is an image of an analytics dashboard by PeopleInsight, a fantastic workforce analytics company.
Move
Why not give this a shot? Yes it will take some time to see the results but every day you spend telling yourself you can’t do it is a day gone by that you can start to strategically contribute to your organization, that your CEO will positively notice.