In the emerging global business outlook, forward looking businesses demand resilience, adaptability, and processes that support continuous improvement, extrinsically and intrinsically. When it comes to pinpointing business success with accuracy, different models and strategies work. A wider and varied range of factors including effective communication and coordination facilitates exploiting reap of benefits; one among them is- considering your workforce.
Having a talented workforce is the first point of call when a company is stepping to achieve its growth targets. Every time, hiring equations differ for all, including job seekers, talent leaders (recruiter), and hiring managers. Recruiters need to stay alert to notice, understand and analyze those recruiting trends and play different yet complementary roles with hiring managers.
Call them the key performance indicators (KPIs), which should be clear, integrative, and shall have the capacity to boost their outreach. KPIs have always been crucial to keeping an eye on the pulse of employees and organizations’ operating performance. A study conducted by McKinsey & Company, pointed that people analytics can easily develop top performers and increase the work productivity by up to 25%. For short or medium-term, aligning with them will enable swifter and better talent-hiring decisions.
However, in the ever-evolving nature of business environments, these KPIs that should be reported to Hiring Managers, change from being valid to invalid in changing times. Still, the hiring process’s right recruiting analytics will let the hiring managers know what the talent managers are actually doing. In the era of rapid automation and advanced techno-driven solutions, KPIs help navigation set and pursue the scalable, reliable, measurable, and time-bound objectives.
“Win the war for talent, together.”
To guide, three KPIs that should be reported to Hiring Managers, are purposefully projected below for talent leaders to educate hiring managers for rightfully tapping the opportunity to place people in time.
1. Forecasted Hours Projected by the Hiring Team
While holding a thorough intake, the talent leaders must take notes about the hiring manager’s expectations by quantifying their teams, functioning, background, specified qualifications, skillset, and experiences required. Here is the start point of narrowing down essential and desirable parameters, establish an overall recruitment strategy, and defining the timeline. Studies indicate the average time to hire ranges between 14 to 63 days. Naturally, too slow or too fast hiring can impact the brand value of a company along with the quality of hires.
Based on that, talent managers shall forecast hours and let the hiring managers know them in advance. It will set a roadmap to chase, clear the priorities and define the points of necessary coordination. This straightforward measurement tool allows the managers to map the controlled and uncontrolled factors where the delay is possible. Further, the team members will proactively know when to expect and when not to expect the deliverables.
2. Talent in the Pipeline
Refining another talent KPI in the pipeline will up-level your recruiting analytics. These data-driven predictive models will do a SWOT analysis, identify the areas of hits and misses, and will allow tapping the potential by recommending real-time solutions. To be as efficient as possible, talent managers need to constant touch with hiring managers by keeping all communication channels open. Whether the hiring is to be done through referrals, online portals, or other means, the right information shall always be delivered at the other end.
Business climates change every other week, so check shall be the frequency of check-ins. It includes a briefing about the candidates in each stage, number of applicants- forecasted vs. actual, interview on boarding, scheduled time in each stage, etc. Prompt feedback provided this way about recruiting analytics will keep the hiring managers informed about the position of hiring, ensure transparency and bring out the progressive negotiations on the table. Naturally, the central agenda behind everyone involved in pooling talent is to find the best talent cost-effectively.
3. Evaluation and Analytics on External Metrics
Talent leaders should team up with a recruiter to take ownership of bigger goals. It creates milestones and generates external metrics concerning top challenges they faced, interview conducted, feedback-taken, hiring decisions, and ultimately on boarding new hires. Every such interaction is a chance to generate insights about the company’s brand image while collecting meaningful inputs and widening its reach. It is one the great chance to know the image of your organization’s work culture and understand the gaps and areas of improvement. Studies indicate that 41% of the candidates who rated their experience poorest are least likely to recommend their positions to their own network and hence, narrow down the total pool of job applicants.
Meanwhile, talent leaders must educate the hiring managers over the strength and opportunities at hand and meaningful and actionable ideas. It is convenient to summarize the ‘to-do’ list weekly and integrate the responses and feedback collected for feedback and learning.
To put it in the overall perspective, talent leaders’ shall pinpoint every step of the recruitment process elaborately, keep the communication channels open and identify the mismatching dots. By having an established process in hand, the involved team will learn together the reasonable time, efforts, and energy involved in delivering the commitment from all sides.

Minakshi Sehrawat is a content writer that specializes in the HR industry. For the past 12+ years, she has worked with companies, social organizations, and newspapers offering writing services and solutions. Her strength is writing long-form content about HR, recruitment, management practices, technology, communities, and events.
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