Recruiting Metrics · Time to Hire and Cost per Hire
Recruiting Metrics
What are recruiting metrics?
- Look at three axes: speed, cost, and quality
- Stage-by-stage conversion rates reveal the bottleneck
- Tracking only speed means skipping vetting
Adding metrics changes what gets said in hiring meetings. A report like 'We can't seem to hire anyone lately' becomes 'Offer acceptance for developer roles dropped to 52% last quarter.' Nobody can answer the first sentence, but the second comes with options: look at the salary table, or look at the interview experience. When numbers appear, so does a point of accountability. Even the fact that interviews slip two weeks at a time because of business executives' schedules looks like plain HR incompetence until you break down the waiting days by stage.
Metrics only make sense once you agree on their definitions. Time to hire can more than double depending on where you start the clock. Measure from the day the opening appears and you include the three weeks a department head sat on the request; measure from the posting date and those three weeks vanish. Cost per hire works the same way: a figure that counts only job-posting fees and search-firm commissions is often less than half of one that also includes interviewer labor and referral bonuses. If you hire fewer than 20 people a year, use the median instead of the average. A single executive role that took four months will drag the whole average up. A metric without a written definition changes its meaning every quarter.
Quality metrics have a weakness: they arrive late. Early attrition and performance one year after hire only become visible half a year after hiring ends, and bad hires keep piling up in the meantime. That is why many companies look first at attrition within 90 days and the share of bottom-rated probation reviews as leading indicators. Adding the hiring channel makes the picture even clearer. Even at similar costs, hires from employee referrals often show higher one-year retention than those from job postings, a difference you never see if you look at cost alone.
Problems usually start when these metrics become a KPI for the HR team alone. If shorter time to hire is tied to HR's evaluation, they cut interview rounds and skip reference checks, and half a year later it comes back as probation failures and the cost of reposting. Conversely, if you cut off search firms to squeeze cost and leave a key engineer seat empty for five months, the revenue lost while that seat sat vacant is far greater than the KRW 15 million (≈ US$11,200) in fees you saved. Speed and cost metrics start lying the moment they become the sole goal, detached from quality metrics.
Jongmu KimCorporate talent development and job skills specialist
Kyungtae KimHR expert · Organizational culture and HR strategy consultantAs HR data analytics spread, measuring hiring by speed, cost, and quality became standard practice, and recruiting is now one of the most common applications of people analytics.
This is the story of Company A, a B2B software company with 180 employees and annual revenue of KRW 32 billion (≈ US$23,941,300). It planned to hire 12 developers this year but filled only 5 positions in the first half, and it took an average of 78 days from posting to start date. Management said, 'Let's increase the hiring budget,' but the HR director decided to first check whether money was really the problem. (Hypothetical example)
- The HR director re-pulled the dates for the past year's 27 hires in Excel. When the starting point was the request approval date instead of the posting date, the average was 96 days, not 78, and 21 of those days went to scheduling interviews alone.
- Broken down by stage, the 34% resume pass rate looked fine, but only 48% of candidates accepted the offer after the final interview. When HR called the 9 candidates who declined, three said 'The salary was right, but we heard nothing for three weeks after the second interview.'
- They also recalculated cost per hire. Once interviewer labor and referral bonuses were included, the per-hire figure jumped from KRW 4.2 million (≈ US$3,140) to KRW 7.8 million (≈ US$5,840). By channel, it ranged from KRW 19 million (≈ US$14,200) for search firms to KRW 2.1 million (≈ US$1,570) for employee referrals, a nearly ninefold gap.
- We agreed with the head of engineering to block out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons every week as fixed slots for second-round interviews, and to give candidates a decision within 5 business days of the interview. The head said, 'If we miss the schedule, put it on me.'
- Two quarters later, time to hire fell from 96 days to 61, and offer acceptance rose from 48% to 71%. Over the same period, attrition within 90 days of hire went from 2 people to 0, and by increasing the share of referral hires, cost per hire dropped from KRW 7.8 million (≈ US$5,840) to KRW 5.9 million (≈ US$4,410).