Identifying the one talent acquisition metric that matters most

Your talent tech tools are spitting out a lot of numbers and data points: Time to hire. Time to fill. Best source or channel of hire. Days the job has been open. Openings by manager. And so on.

But what metric matters most?

We asked one of the most experienced talent professionals out there, Ronnie Bratcher. He has spoken at every relevant conference you can name, participated in the metrics committee for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals, judged multiple sourcing competitions, and trained recruiters around the country for decades.  

Bratcher’s favorite recruiting metric: hiring manager acceptance rates. If you sent 10 people to the hiring manager, did they accept 9 to move to the next steps?

This can even work from sourcer to recruiter. If a sourcer shared 10 profiles with a recruiter, how many were then passed to the hiring manager?

Acceptance rate is truly a recruiting-focused measure

The acceptance-rate measure focuses on recruiters finding and engaging the right talent for the business. It doesn’t “punish” recruiters for how long it takes managers to make a decision, provide feedback after an interview, or other factors that are harder for recruiters and sources to control than the slate of candidates they present.

The right tech tools make a difference for measurement

The consolidated tools and data spun from the right platform or tech stack can help increase your visibility into acceptance rates, and possibly even help you improve it.

Delivering profiles to hiring managers who fit — not just a large quantity of candidates  — requires technology that can provide a holistic view of a candidate. 

That 3D view involves not just someone’s past employers and titles, but their validated skills, as well as their attributes that match your desires (such as startup experience; past work at mission-driven companies; or quick PhD completion).

The talent team at Boulevard has used that kind of enriched 3D view to find people with SaaS experience and startup experience. KIPP Northern California has used these holistic portraits of candidates to find teachers with the right experience, credentials, and certificates.

AI and history repeating

Meanwhile, Bratcher has been watching the excitement over AI and finding it awfully familiar. He says it is reminiscent of the “explosion of search engine madness” that Google’s growth created before the Y2K boom.

The search engine era, he says, was followed by a new era defined by the growth of browser extensions and other tools not necessarily designed for hiring. 

Recruiters at the time often extracted LinkedIn contact information with specialized tools, scheduled interviews with Calendly, and managed candidate communication through email platforms like Mailchimp instead of a dedicated CRM. Additionally, they repurposed Salesforce as an applicant tracking system, incorporated Loom for video content, and conducted assessments through SurveyMonkey.

Now, that era has given way to the current AI trend. “Every five seconds there’s an AI tool coming up,” Bratcher says. 

Bratcher wonders if some people are over-indexing on the AI tools they’re familiar with, such as ChatGPT, in the same way they got used to using Google. ChatGPT may be best for some people, but other technologies like Claude, Grok, or various custom-built tools may be better for others.

Stay focused on the metrics that matter most for hiring success

“The world was taught that we have to go to Google to get information, regardless of whether there were better search engines,” Bratcher says. “Patterns repeat themselves.”

The one thing that’s also consistent: the need to focus on quality of hire, and the quality of candidates generated by a recruiting and sourcing team. 

What metric is most useful to you? Here are 8 insights that can help elevate your talent acquisition strategy.