The blueprint for boosting your recruitment ROI

Tracking your hiring metrics helps you make better hires in less time, using fewer resources. As a result, you can improve your recruitment ROI (and bottom line) by:

1. Identifying problems or bottlenecks in your hiring process and their underlying causes.

2. Aligning recruitment with your organization’s strategic goals.

3. Supporting data-driven decision-making. For example, when investing in a new hiring tool, you can track the relevant metrics before and after introducing it to ensure the tool has the desired effect. You can also use metrics to make the business case for investments in your hiring process, ensuring you’re spending money on the right solutions.

With a skills-based hiring approach, you prioritize candidates’ skills over their qualifications or specific experience. Data shows that this method can significantly improve important hiring outcomes and maximize recruitment ROI.

Our research for our 2024 State of Skills-Based Hiring report revealed that by taking a skills-first approach:

⭐81% of employers experience reduced time to hire, saving between 412 and 792 hours per senior management role and 33 to 660 hours per non-senior hire.

⭐ Most employers reduce their cost per hire by 26-50%, saving an average of $1,218 to $2,342 per role.

⭐ 91% of employers improve retention rates. 

⭐ 94% say skills-based hiring is more predictive of performance than resumes, leading to better quality hires and significant savings by reducing mis-hires.

⭐ 90% of employers report improved diversity, with 34% reporting a significant positive impact (26-50%).

Using technology to automate repetitive tasks in your recruitment process can improve the candidate experience and cut hiring costs. 

Try using recruiting automation to create job ads, test candidates’ skills, update candidates on their progress, and schedule interviews. This makes recruitment faster and frees the hiring team to focus on more strategic work. It also helps you avoid losing top talent due to a slow process – especially during large hiring pushes.

However, it’s essential to be strategic. Some parts of hiring, such as interviews, shouldn’t be automated. After all, hiring is about people, and human involvement is key to giving candidates the experience they expect.

When used correctly, recruitment automation can deliver massive ROI. 

For example, Dyninno Group - a large international group of companies - needed to fill over 2,000 positions in less than six months. It used TestGorilla’s assessments to streamline its recruitment and quickly find candidates with the right skills.

As a result they were able to achieve the following outcomes:

Research shows that employee referrals bring in candidates who are:

✅ Higher quality than those from general recruitment processes.

✅ More likely to accept a job offer.

✅ More likely to stay long-term.

In other words, using employee referrals can make your hiring more efficient – thus improving your recruitment ROI and bottom line. 

We can see the real-life impact of this in companies that use employee referral programs. 

For instance, fuel retailer TriStar Energy struggled to attract long-term employees. To address this, it started using ERIN, a digital employee referral platform.  As a result, TriStar Energy boosted average employee retention from 30 days to 6 months while reducing cost per hire.

💡 Pro tip: Don’t rely exclusively on employee referrals. Use them alongside other candidate sources and hiring strategies to keep your recruitment fair and supportive of diversity. 

Structured interviews – where the hiring panel asks all candidates the same questions – are an excellent tool for improving your recruitment ROI. According to research by McGill University, these interviews are one of the most effective predictors of job performance, highlighting their potential impact on quality of hire. 

They can also help you:

1. Ensure a consistent approach, regardless of who’s conducting the interview. This promotes hiring fairness. 

2. Shorten time to hire, as you only need to prepare one set of questions for a role. Standardized questions also make it easier to compare candidates’ answers. 

3. Reduce the risk of unconscious bias by focusing on candidates’ skills over anything else, including personal characteristics. 

Boost offer acceptance rate by allowing you to prepare questions that clearly convey the role’s expectations to candidates.

Various software solutions can measure, track, compare, and analyze key HR metrics, including recruitment metrics. These tools can help you answer questions about your hiring process – why is something an issue, and how can you improve it?

Choosing the right analytics tool for your organization depends on:

1. The in-house skills you have.

2. Your recruitment budget.

3. The level of analysis you need. 

For instance, if you have employees with data science skills, they can use programming languages like R and Python to analyze large datasets and measure hiring metrics. 

If you want a solution that offers built-in analytics, platforms like Visier and DreamTeam include dashboards and reports to help you visualize key metrics. These resources are handy when building buy-in for new recruitment strategies and initiatives.

ATS software helps you manage and track candidates, streamlining the hiring process. Most solutions offer features to automate different parts of recruitment, such as candidate emails and interview scheduling. 

ATSs can also help you collect hiring data. Many include analytics features to generate reports on metrics like time to hire and offer acceptance rate. With these features, you can use an ATS to review your recruitment metrics regularly and improve your hiring process. 

There are various ATSs on the market, and it pays to try a few to find the one that best suits your business’s needs. 

💡 Pro tip: Make sure the ATS you choose integrates with your existing tech stack to avoid workflow disruptions and siloed data. 

Pre-employment skills testing, or talent assessment, is a key tool for adopting a skills-based approach to hiring. 

With unbiased insights into candidates’ cognitive abilities, job-specific skills, and cultural fit, you can identify suitable candidates early in the process. This reduces hiring time and the risk of costly mis-hires. 

For example, using skills testing, an organization with 100 employees looking to hire 15 people in the next 12 months can achieve the following outcomes:

A skills gap analysis gives you a snapshot of the skills within your organization – and the skills you need to bring in through new hires. With this information, you can fine-tune your hiring strategies to target the exact skills you need. This helps you reduce both time to hire and cost per hire. 

Additionally, you can create better, more accurate job descriptions and postings so candidates have a clear picture of what you’re looking for and whether they’re suitable for the role. This encourages best-fit candidates to apply, improving quality of hire and reducing turnover.

Candidate feedback tools provide detailed qualitative and quantitative insights into the candidate journey. You can then use these to identify ways to improve your hiring process and your hiring metrics. 

Here are some tools and channels you can use to collect candidate feedback: 

📝 Online candidate reviews. 💬 Social media comments from candidates. 📊 Talent feedback software. 📋 Candidate experience surveys.

Delivering the best candidate hiring experience helps you stand out as an employer, attract top talent and diverse candidates, and reduce candidate drop-offs. In turn, you’ll see more completed applications, higher offer acceptance rates, and better-quality hires.