Measuring Your Firm’s Effectiveness – Which Metrics Matter?

As the saying goes, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The smartest management teams are constantly measuring their company’s performance in order to benchmark and improve it over time. In Bullhorn’s 2012 staffing and recruiting survey, recruiting firms were asked which metrics they use to measure their firm’s overall effectiveness. The top pick was Hit Rate (the number of applicants making it to successive rounds of the selection process), at 32 percent. Total Number of Placements was a close second at 28 percent, while Time to Fill came in dead last, at just 3 percent.

So, how did this year’s respondents rank the metrics that are most important in evaluating the effectiveness of their sales people? Total Number of Placements was the runaway winner in this year’s survey (selected the top metric by almost 75 percent of respondents), just as it was in last year’s survey. Grabbing the distant second spot in this year’s survey was Number of Job Orders, with Placement Ratio coming in a close third.

Do your firm’s metrics align with these findings?  Are firms focusing on the right performance measures to evaluate salespeople and overall business performance.  Let us know your thoughts.