The nine metrics give you a common language. This page shows how to apply them well: how to set your data up so the numbers are trusted, why each metric matters, and how they combine into a case your board will act on.
The metrics are only as good as the data beneath them. A few disciplines, agreed before you measure, are the difference between numbers your leadership trusts and numbers they argue with.
Apply the nine definitions the same way across the whole function: every requisition, every recruiter, every reporting period. A number is only comparable, internally or against the benchmark, when everyone counts it the same way.
Finance does not report revenue from a half-complete ledger, and hiring data deserves the same rigour. Accuracy and completeness are the difference between a benchmark you can defend and one you cannot.
These metrics are a new way of measuring, so they need socialising, not just switching on. Agree the definitions with HR, Finance and hiring managers up front, and secure a senior sponsor, so the numbers are trusted when they land.
Each figure has a natural home: TA owns the ATS dates, HR owns headcount, Finance owns revenue. Name the owner for each input so nothing falls through the gap.
Decide which part of the business you are measuring, whether the whole organisation, a division or a region, and hold it constant. Moving the boundary breaks both your own trend and any comparison.
Dates and outcomes must be logged correctly as recruitment happens; they cannot be reconstructed cleanly at year end. Disciplined entry in the ATS is what makes every metric trustworthy.
A point-in-time measure of unmet demand. Because it is a stock rather than a flow, it tends to move before the cost and attrition metrics, so a persistently high ratio is an early signal that vacancies are being created faster than they can be filled, with existing teams absorbing the shortfall.
0203Time to Offer Accepted and Time to Start show whether a high vacancy level is a volume problem or a speed problem.
The part of the vacancy that recruitment can actually control, ending at acceptance and before the notice period. It is the main lever TA holds over the financial cost of a vacancy, which is why it drives Metric 09, and a lengthening trend usually points to one specific bottleneck rather than general slowness.
09Financial Impact turns the days lost into a pound figure, giving you the business case for investment in hiring capacity.
The total time a role produces nothing, from opening to first day. Read against Metric 02, the difference is the notice and mobilisation period, which sits largely outside recruitment's control, so separating the two stops TA being judged on delay it cannot influence.
02The gap against Time to Offer Accepted isolates notice-period and mobilisation time from recruitment speed.
The point at which all upstream effort is realised or lost. A declined offer is among the most expensive outcomes in hiring, wasting the full pipeline cost for that role and resetting the clock. Reported by salary band, it shows whether declines concentrate at senior levels, where offers are most contested.
0207Read with Time to Offer Accepted and Sourcing Channel Effectiveness, it shows whether declines come from a slow process or weak channels.
A fully loaded cost that includes internal TA time and attributed HR effort, not just agency fees, so it exposes the true cost that narrower measures hide. It is the denominator for any return-on-investment conversation about recruitment.
0609First-Year Attrition reveals spend lost to early leavers; Financial Impact sets that cost against the value each hire returns.
The most objective proxy for quality of hire available from HR data alone. An early leaver incurs the full cost of hiring with none of the return, then the cost again to replace them. Read against sourcing and interviewing, it separates a selection problem from an onboarding one.
0507Cost per Starter quantifies the spend lost to early leavers; Sourcing Channel Effectiveness shows which channels produce people who stay.
Measured on hires and accepted offers rather than application volume, so it corrects the common error of funding channels that generate noise but few starters. With cost and attrition attributed by channel, sourcing becomes a return decision rather than a spend decision.
0506Read with Cost per Starter and First-Year Attrition, it finds channels that are cheap to hire from and produce hires who stay.
Quantifies a cost that rarely appears in any budget: hiring-manager and interviewer time. A high ratio signals wasted effort and slower decisions; a very low one can mean too little assessment, so the value is in calibrating the process, not simply reducing it. The calculator currently accepts average interview stages per hire as the input, until ATS data supports the full measure.
0206Read with Time to Offer Accepted and First-Year Attrition, it shows whether heavy interviewing is slowing the process without improving who you keep.
Reframes recruitment from a cost centre into a driver of protected revenue, translating days saved on Metric 02 into the currency the board acts on. It is an indicative model based on average revenue per employee, so it estimates revenue exposure rather than measuring it precisely.
0205Time to Offer Accepted supplies the days behind the figure, the core investment case; Cost per Starter weighs value created against cost to create it.
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