A talent leader's guide to end-of-year recruiting reports and benchmarking

5 mins, 54 secs read time

The importance of recruiting reporting

At the beginning of each year, companies begin to plan ahead with fresh goals and aspirations in mind. Understanding performance is key to setting expectations and goals for whatever’s up next, and recruiting reporting is no exception. Doing a comprehensive recap at the end of the year gives you an opportunity to showcase your team’s progress to your leadership team and key stakeholders in a language they readily understand and can get on board with.

Showing your team’s progress in hiring also gives your team a platform to present how you’ve made an impact on overarching company goals. For example, if you have company representation goals in place, this is a perfect opportunity to recognize your recruiting team’s efforts and influence on the outcome of company-wide representation.

While tracking recruiting metrics can give insights into team-wide performance, it’s critical to report on the metrics that matter and align them with your company’s goals. For instance, analyzing the strongest candidate sources out of those you’ve hired will give an indication of where you can minimize spend on low-return job boards or agencies. As you’re determining the metrics that matter to you, consider company-wide goals such as sales targets – and how the talent acquisition (TA) team’s efforts contribute to these greater efforts.

The metrics we focus on at Greenhouse

Question: Are we meeting a diverse pool of candidates?

Top- and bottom-of-funnel demographic representation: As a company, Greenhouse naturally prioritizes running structured and equitable hiring processes. As a part of this, we actively track our pipeline demographic data to understand where underrepresented candidates might be disproportionately rejected from our searches. We track the top-of-funnel demographic data to ensure we’re meeting with a representative group of candidates and we track our bottom-of-funnel demographic data to ensure we have a similar demographic breakdown, so we know our processes aren’t adversely impacting underrepresented groups. We aid these efforts with diversity sourcing strategies and interviewer trainings focused on DE&I.

Dig into the demographic representation in your company: We don’t make hiring decisions on the basis of someone’s identity (and you never should), but we’ve partnered with our people ops and legal teams to get visibility into company demographic data. This has given us insight into the impact of our team’s efforts on the actual representation of our company. Of course, the demographic breakdown of your company is not solely the TA team’s responsibility, but it’s still beneficial to see your team’s impact on this outcome, especially if you’ve devoted time and resources to building a DE&I recruiting strategy.

Question: Are we delivering what the business needs?

Hires to goal: This tells us how we’re addressing the actual need of the business, as they relate to net-new heads and backfills. The goal isn’t to hit 100%, as that’s nearly impossible given you’re factoring in attrition, but ideally you’re hitting at least 90% each quarter. This metric is a snapshot of your team’s effective business partnership for your leadership team.

Time-to-fill: This metric gives a picture of how quickly we were able to answer the company’s headcount needs, which helps as you plan out when you should launch a role. Always consider distilling by the role’s specific level or location to understand how various factors affect this metric. For example, think about how much time it takes you to hire a director vs. hiring for an entry-level position and how that can play a role in your planning process.

Question: Are we a competitive employer?

Offer acceptance rate: This gives us a sense of the competitiveness of our offers compared to the others that candidates are receiving in the market. Pay attention to why candidates are rejecting your offers for a more specific idea of where your offers aren’t matching expectations.

Candidate sentiment: This shows how our candidates view their interactions with us. The survey notes in particular give clear insights and sometimes even some suggestions to how we can improve the candidate experience.

Tips to set yourself up for a successful end-of-year (EOY) reporting process

Consider your audience. Who is this information going out to? Think from your stakeholders’ perspective – the questions you are hoping to answer for your C-suite will differ from those you’re hoping to answer for your TA team. Ensure the information you share is relevant to the intended audience.

Treat your future self and build this structure early on. Building the structure for regularly cadenced reporting is key to making EOY reporting seamless in a traditionally busy time. Additionally, investing time in building a comprehensive dashboard that can be sliced and diced with ease earlier in the year will pay off tremendously and make your regular and EOY reports more readily accessible when you need them.

Use what you already have access to! Greenhouse offers a plethora of awesome reports that we reference on a regular basis to report out to our stakeholders (like the pipeline demographic and candidate sentiment reports).

Do a “year in review”. What else would your stakeholders want to know about that might not be typically shared out on a monthly or quarterly cadence? For example, sharing the percentage that each department grew over the year with department heads can lend perspective on how quickly their respective teams are growing over time.

Highlight your org’s contributions. TA teams everywhere wouldn’t be nearly as successful without the support of the company around them. From the number of scorecards submitted to the number of hours spent interviewing, sharing out company-wide metrics can be just as much of an opportunity to highlight how your organization has been instrumental to the hiring process as it is to show the TA team’s accomplishments.

Consider the context. We often think about team size, company events, trends in the market and more to contextualize the results we’re seeing. What was the capacity of your TA team at the time you received your headcount plan and did this plan align with your team’s capacity? If your sales team overperformed, how did that impact the overall hires you needed to make? Did your company, like many others this year, experience a higher rate of attrition than you expected? Zooming out to think of the bigger picture is valuable at any time of the year – and downright critical as a new year approaches.

We hope this guide is helpful for creating a successful end-of-year report so you can plan for next year’s success. Learn more about how to use reporting to engage your stakeholders in this video from Greenhouse Open Forum with SurveyMonkey and Datto.

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