A company called the other day to ask about rationally adjusting their recruiting headcount to match a temporary reduction in hiring volume. Was there a “right” number of recruiters for a given volume of hires?
There is if you have the right historical metrics in place and can accurately compare the efficiency of individual recruiters with each other. Knowing how many requisitions and hires your most successful recruiters have handled in the past, you divide their workload into the total number of projected requisitions and hires and there’s your headcount. Projecting from the performance of your best people may give an optimistic assessment of how a larger, more diverse group might perform, but at least you know where the performance bar ought to be.
Here is some hard data from the Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report. The updated 2009 Edition is due out shortly.
- The total annual compensation recruited across all categories was $816,000 per recruiter.
- Over a 12 month period, the average number of requisitions ranged from a low of 59 in the $65-$75,000 category to 92 in the under $25,000 category.
- Also over 12 months, the average number of hires ranged from 12 at the high salary level to 33 at the low end.
The problem becomes more complicated when comparing the efficiency of recruiters who work on different types of assignments, for example, middle managers or skilled professionals vs. hourly personnel. There is a solution here too, but you need a worksheet to make the calculations.
This efficiency calculation focuses on cost, but not on the traditional cost-per-hire, which can be deceiving. Instead of dividing expenses by bodies, it divides them by total compensation recruited. This compensates for differences in job level.
There are other equally important metrics that focus on quality of hire, which ideally would be compared side by side with efficiency. Efficiency without adequate quality is false efficiency.
These sample performance statistics represent 12 month rolling averages for four recruiters working side by side in the same department.
- Recruiter #1 handled more openings and hired more people than recruiter #2. But recruiter #2, who had to find and hire more expensive people, did so on average in less time.
- Recruiters #3 and #4 hired about the same number of people, but #4 did so more quickly. On the other hand #3 had to hire for higher-level positions, yet spent less money doing so.
Every recruiter here could make some argument for having done a good job: #1 could cite workload, by far the most requisitions to handle; #2 could cite a combination of time and higher job level; #4 could point to lowest cost per hire. But the efficiency winner would be #3, the greatest productivity per dollar spent, an average of 15.6% of total compensation recruited.
The updated 2009 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report is now available at a special pre-publication price in the Staffing.org store.
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