Staffing Metrics

How are you currently measuring your recruiter workload at your organization? If you are like most organizations, you may have many lingering questions on what is the best way to measure recruiter workload.I’ve seen the questions posted countless times. What is the maximum number of openings a recruiter should have? How many requisitions are too many for a recruiter to handle? Why can some of my recruiters handle far more openings at any given time than other recruiters? The questions are so important to effectively operate your businesses. As with many things, I think the question being is asked is the problem. Aren’t you really asking how efficient are my recruiters? How can I determine if they are at, near, or over capacity? How do they measure up against one another?

I can address the first question of efficiency. The second question regarding capacity, in my opinion, is a matter of each individual company situation. Benchmarking that data against other companies can be dangerous. How many companies operate exactly the same? Are recruiting roles the same from organization to organization? Is the value proposition for hiring people at your organization different than your competitors? Benchmark internally first to improve quarter on quarter and year on year results before looking externally. Once you look externally for benchmarking, pay close attention to processes that may help your company operate more efficiently. Don’t be too quick to focus on your numbers catching or beating your competition. Ultimately run your own race.

Now let’s get back to efficiency. How can I determine the maximum number of openings my recruiter should have? The first step is really measuring each recruiter equally using the same criteria. This shouldn’t be done by calculating the total number of requisitions. First, suspend disbelief for a moment and agree with the premise that it is typically harder to fill a requisition that pays $100,000 salary than it is to fill a requisition that pays $35,000 salary. If you are able to do that then we are off to a good start. If you don’t agree with our premise then contact us regarding the reason's why. Please note that my premise says “typically” a higher paying position is harder to fill but there will certainly be instances when that is not true. No metric or formula covers every situation. If you are looking for something that covers everything then you’ll be searching endlessly.

The second premise that I’d like you to agree with is that positions that pay higher than others are typically more important to the organization. I expect that phrase to stir some controversy based on the common belief that every part of an organization contributes to their success and all are important. I agree with that but organizations pay different people in different positions more than others simply because they have to. It is supply and demand. If you agree with those two premises, then we can move on regarding how to calculate a measurement so we can fairly measure workload of each recruiter. If compensation is the best indicator of both difficulty in recruiting and importance of a hire to an organization, then we should use total compensation recruited to measure workload of each recruiter as well as average compensation recruited to determine the difficulty level of requisitions a recruiter is trying to fill. With both those data points you should be able to fairly compare workload of each recruiter to another.

Recruiter #1 has 25 Open Reqs
Average compensation recruited at $80k
Total comp recruited $2,000,000

Recruiter #2 has 10 Open Reqs
Average compensation recruited at $150k
Total comp recruited $1,500,000