Regularly tracking and analysing your recruitment data is an essential part of any recruitment process. In education, where your budgets are likely to be extremely tight, it’s even more important.
Keeping a close eye on your hiring data is the only way you’ll know exactly what’s working and what’s not in your hiring process so you can optimise your strategy and reduce costs as your processes become more efficient. And to do this, you need to be tracking the right recruitment metrics.
Recruitment metrics are the hiring-related numbers businesses use to understand their recruitment processes. Each recruitment metric has a different way of tracking, measuring and presenting them.
Tracking recruitment metrics matters a lot in education recruitment because they highlight things about the hiring process that we’re often too busy to notice. For example, you might not realise your cost-per-hire has shot up in the last year because you’ve been so focused on pulling in as many teacher applications as possible in this tough market that your process has become inefficient. In these situations, it’s likely you’re spreading advertising costs across multiple job boards - even the ones that don’t bring in quality candidates.
These are the kinds of scenarios where looking at your recruitment data can provide real valuable, actionable insight.
If you’re using a good recruitment software package that has an ATS and a linked job board, you’re likely to have a reporting and analytics feature that continuously tracks and collates all the important recruitment data you need to know and presents it on an easy-to-read recruitment analytics dashboard.
Some of this data will be translated into recruitment metrics for you, and some you can use the data on your reporting dashboard to calculate the hiring metrics yourself manually.
Here are a few important hiring metrics that you should always track when hiring in education. These metrics will help you identify where you can make improvements that will reduce costs and make your hiring process more efficient.
Your cost-per-hire metric tells you how much it costs overall to hire a new teacher into your organisation. The average cost-per-hire for teachers differs largely from one organisation to another, but it’s still an important one to track.
To calculate your cost-per-hire, you add all internal and external recruiting costs and divide that by your total number of hires over a specific period.
CPH = (internal recruiting costs + external recruiting costs) / total number of hires
The cost-per-hire metric is essential when looking to manage and reduce recruitment costs because it’s so black and white. Looking individually at cost-per-hire for certain roles can highlight if you’re spending too much time and resources on particular vacancies and need to mix up your hiring strategy to reduce costs.
Benchmarking your cost-per-vacancy against industry averages can also be useful, as this tells you if you’re spending way above or below the industry average.
Source of hire is essentially a recruitment marketing metric. This metric tells you where a candidate originally came from and how they’ve ended up in your recruiting pipeline.
Some recruitment software will automatically categorise a candidate’s original source for you, giving you valuable insight into how candidates found your job advert.
Source of hire is slightly different from the other metrics in this list because there’s no calculating involved - it’s just a matter of viewing the data on your dashboard.
Source of hire is a crucial metric to keep an eye on when you’re looking to reduce recruitment costs because it can be very revealing about how and where you spend your recruitment marketing budget.
The reason for this, is that we often base our decisions about where to focus advertising spend on which platforms pull in the most candidate applications. But how many of those applications actually convert into placements? Your source-of-hire metric tells you clearly which job boards or candidate attraction strategies are pulling in the most relevant and highest quality teachers to your roles, so you can focus your time and energy where it matters.
With configurable reports, you can find out which channels give the best return on investment; allowing you to optimise your spending based on which source is the most effective.
The time-to-fill metric - sometimes referred to as ‘hiring velocity’ - is a way of calculating how long it takes your organisation to hire a teacher.
The speed at which a teacher goes from filling out an application to standing in the classroom is extremely important because the longer the position goes unfilled, the more money your school will be spending (on supply teachers, advertising roles, etc.). If your recruitment process is slow, it’s also very likely you'll be losing great candidates along the way.
When you’re calculating time-to-fill, the important thing is to define when the recruitment process begins and ends for your school. Do you calculate from the day the job opening is approved, or from the day the job application is first advertised? Does the recruitment process end when the candidate accepts a job offer or when they show up for their first day at your school? Whichever option you choose, just make sure it’s consistent across all positions.
Your average time-to-fill number (where you divide the total number of days by the number of roles you’ve filled over a given period) is helpful if you track it on a monthly basis. If you see your time to fill number is going up, this suggests you need to dig further into the details and find out why.
Time-to-fill becomes more useful the more granular you go with it. For example, if you can see one particular department at your school has a longer time-to-fill than others, why is this?
And what stages of the hiring process are causing things to slow down? Are you managing applications manually when they could be automated? Are your job ads slow because hiring managers aren’t using job ad templates that can speed things up? Identifying these sorts of recruitment bottlenecks can reduce recruitment costs substantially.
You might think that employee retention rates are more to do with employee satisfaction than hiring, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Your retention rate can also tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your recruitment process in hiring the right people into the right roles.
To calculate your employee retention rate, you would choose a defined period (a school term, for example) and divide the number of employees who stayed at your school for your chosen time by the number of employees you had at the start, then multiply that number by 100 to get your retention percentage.
Employee retention = (total employees – employees that have left) / total employees x 100
Keeping a close eye on your retention rates will help you reduce hiring costs because if your retention rate for certain roles is particularly low, this is a sign you’re hiring the wrong people into this role. It can also indicate internal issues that are pushing new starts out the door and investigating these could save you a lot of money on re-hiring.
While all these recruitment metrics will help you reduce hiring costs, they shouldn’t be used in isolation. The best way to work with these kinds of numbers is to cross reference them with each other (and other hiring metrics not mentioned in this guide) to provide a fuller, more accurate picture of how your school is performing when it comes to recruitment.
To gather your recruitment data efficiently and gain an accurate and actionable picture of your processes, you need a recruitment software with good reporting features that you can customise. Find out how School Recruiter's Enhanced Reporting dashboard will help you optimise recruitment strategy to reduce your spending.