Nowadays, controlling is also an integral part of the recruiting process, in line with the motto “Trust is good, controlling is better.” Therefore, you need particular KPIs (key performance indicators) to observe and analyze your recruiting process. We are going to show you why HR controlling is especially important in 2019, and in which direction the world of HR and the labor market have moved since last year.

Use KPIs to be successful

Motivated employees contribute significantly to a company’s success. This makes reaching out to the most promising candidates and convincing them to join your company even more important. An optimized recruiting process will help you to achieve this. This is why you should try to minimize your time-to-reply and your time-to-hire, for example. Because candidates want a quick and uncomplicated application process, and they want a reply as soon as possible. As a company, show every applicant that you appreciate their application by replying quickly, regardless of whether the person is suited to the job or not.

How recruitment software helps

In order to minimize key performance indicators such as time-to-hire, you will first have to define, measure and interpret them. Since you often must work with a great deal of data and, as a result, can easily lose track of things, a recruitment system could be useful. It allows you to make ongoing comparisons and makes collecting and analyzing data easier. A user study on current HR trends conducted by Capterra showed that, even today, nearly 30% of companies do not use a special software for personnel management.[1] It is precisely the same figure, i.e. 30%, when it comes to companies that do not use KPIs in a targeted way to measure the success of recruiting.[2] Is it a coincidence that both figures are the same? We don’t think so!

Recruiting facts and figures

2018 was a very exciting year for HR. Let’s take a look at it and see which industries and departments had a particularly short time-to-hire and where it was difficult to fill vacancies. The following infographic provides reliable information on recruiting in various industries and departments.

Controlling last year

Employee search 2018 – Top 3

There were some fields looking for a particularly large number of employees last year. The Sales and IT departments topped the list. Although Administration was among the top 3 for employee searches, there were more than double the number of vacancies to be filled in Sales.

Hiring 2018 – Top 3

Companies’ customer orientation increased last year, and this can be seen from the fact that many new employees were hired in Sales and Customer Service. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the Sales department ranked 2nd, as companies were looking for many new specialists in Sales. The only other department that ranked higher was Customer Service, which increased the number of specialists hired by 20% again in 2018. The last of the top 3 was Purchasing, which hired almost 30% fewer employees.

Time-to-Hire

Time-to-Hire is the KPI which sheds light on your company’s recruiting process. There are many different ways to interpret this KPI, and this is something that can be defined within the company. We define it as the amount of time that passes from when an applicant applies until the applicant is hired. Areas such as Purchasing and Customer Service has the shortest Time-to-Hire, at 28 and 31 days respectively. The areas of Management, Medicine and Public Relations had the longest Time-to-Hire, at 58 and 50 days respectively.

Time-to-Rejection

It also makes sense to measure Time-to-Rejection if you want to optimize your recruiting process. How long did it take companies to tell candidates that they weren’t the right fit for the job in 2018? IT, Administration and HR ranked highest, with “unfortunately not” candidates being informed within 19 days. It took nearly twice as long, i.e. 33 days, for candidates in Project Management and Research to receive this information.

Hire percentage

The percentage of newly hired candidates (hire percentage) is also particularly interesting. It sheds light on the ratio of applications received to the number of employees actually hired. Purchasing ranks first in terms of this KPI, with 12% of applicants also really being hired. In other words, 1 person out of 8 who applied for a job in Purchasing was actually hired by this department in 2018. Last year, only 1 of 50 people was hired in HR; this amounts to 2% of applicants. This shows us that there were many people applying for a single vacancy.

But what do all these figures mean for this year? As a company, you should also keep an eye on your recruiting KPIs and incorporate HR controlling into your company in 2019. Improve your KPIs, make your company appealing to promising candidates and turn 2019 into your most successful recruiting year!

[1] Capterra 2019, Nutzerstudie zu HR Trends 2019
[2] forsa 2018, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) im Personalbereich