How to Measure Success with Marketplace Partners

Time Saved

One of the most quantifiable and tangible ways to measure success with a marketplace partner is looking at the hours you’ll save. Traditionally, this means automating manual work so that your team can spend more time building relationships, prospecting clients, or making placements.

Before you demo with such a solution, perform some timed tests to determine how long it takes to perform functions that you could automate with a partner. This will allow you to come into a demo with an exact understanding of how much their solution will impact the specific workflow of your firm.

Of course, many other types of marketplace partners can help you save time, too. This might mean outsourcing a function like marketing or it could mean that you improve your ramp-up time during onboarding—the majority of staffing professionals say it takes more than a month until a new hire is effective. Whatever your goal, take note of how much time you allocate currently, and how much time you can save.

Product Adoption

Stepping up your team’s product adoption is one of the quickest ways to drive results. Solutions that elevate your team’s onboarding, training, and support will allow you to do more with what you have. Product adoption solutions help you get the most out of your tools by keeping you fully trained on all their features and functionality.

How can you measure the effectiveness of product adoption? Consider combining employee surveys and core performance metrics. Employee surveys help you ensure that the onboarding experience is useful and intuitive and performance metrics help you determine the impact on your bottom line. Some possible performance metrics to track:

• Job Coverage
• Pipeline Velocity
• Redeployment Rate
• Fill Rate

Visibility into Business Performance

Do you have insight into the metrics mentioned in the last section? Data is one of the most important assets you have as a staffing firm. Many partners allow you to capture, analyze, and visualize that data to help you better understand your business and how your teams are performing. We surveyed staffing professionals to find out their most valuable performance metrics. Here are two of the top picks:

Fill Rate

57 percent of staffing pros rank fill rate as a top metric. It’s hard to argue with the pros on this one—fill rate is essential for understanding your firm’s efficiency. A low fill rate (job orders filled/job orders received) is a warning sign and an invitation to dig deeper into your metrics. Is there one weak link in your pipeline?

Is there one weak link in your pipeline? Are your submittals not resulting in hires? Do you have trouble finding candidates for a position? Is your team shorthanded? Answering these questions could help you discover a solution to your fill rate woes.

Submittal-to-Hire

The submittal-to-hire ratio combines elements of both quantity and quality, so it’s particularly useful as a tool to explore your productivity. If your firm has a high ratio, more qualification may be needed prior to client submittal. A low ratio? That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it may point to a weak pipeline.

Among North American staffing firms, the sweet spot appears to be submitting three to four candidates for every hire made. Forty percent fall into that bucket, compared to 24 percent who submit four to five candidates and the highly-effective firms (14 percent) who only submit one to two candidates per hire.