Recruiting Metrics You Need to Monitor for Hiring Success

This blog post was originally published on March 6, 2023, and was updated on January 21, 2025.

Today’s recruiters face a variety of intersecting challenges — competition for qualified candidates is high, budgets are tight, and reaching applicants now requires posts on a dizzying number of job boards, social media platforms, and other online channels. The data your hiring campaigns generate can help you allocate precious resources to improve results — but only if you know how to unlock its power.

Enter recruiting metrics. But which recruitment KPIs actually matter? What data should you focus on to optimise returns on your hiring budget and drive growth for your business? The number of ways to measure progress is virtually endless — and many of them sound deceptively similar.

Let’s explore some of the most important recruitment metrics: what they are, why they matter, and how you can use them to improve hiring.

The Best Recruiting Metrics to Measure Your Success

How do you choose the right KPIs for recruitment? That depends almost entirely on your hiring goals. If you want to fill vacancies fast, and that’s all that matters to your team, the recruiting metrics you’ll want to monitor will be vastly different from a company that is aiming to minimise the cost of hiring and retaining staff.

This list is based on our experience working with a variety of hiring teams around the world and covers all the key recruiting KPIs you’ll need if you want to balance efficiency and budget. Although there are only six entries on our list, this post actually covers 11 recruitment metrics: we’ve combined some similar ones in single entries to help highlight the differences in how they should be used.

Pro Tip: Check out our recent post on 2025 recruitment marketing benchmarks for more insights on how your metrics stack up.

1. Cost Per Hire and Cost Per Click

Cost per hire: Also known as CPH, cost per hire is exactly what it sounds like — it can be found by dividing the total amount you’ve spent on recruitment (both internal and external costs) and dividing by the number of hires in that period.
Cost per click: A common marketing metric, CPC refers to what you pay for every person who clicks on your job ad. To calculate your cost per click, divide your total advertising cost by the total number of clicks (not applications) your job posting received.

Both CPH and CPC can help identify spending issues in your recruitment strategy. A higher-than-desired cost per hire should prompt a full investigation of your hiring strategy to identify potential savings. A higher-than-desired cost per click can point to issues with the platforms you’re posting on (job boards, social media, your own website, etc.) or with the ad itself.

2. Time to Hire and Time to Fill

Time to hire: This recruitment KPI refers to the amount of time (in days) from your brand’s first interaction with an applicant (their application or communication from a recruiter) to when they are hired.
Time to fill: Time to fill refers to the amount of time (in days) it takes to fill a vacancy, from the initial approval of a job requisition to the candidate’s acceptance of an offer.

Pro Tip: The average time to fill a vacancy is 48 days, compared to 53 days in the rest of Europe and 47 days worldwide. Check out our blog post on recruitment metrics benchmarks for more data.

These recruiting metrics are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same — one measures the amount of time you spend interacting with an applicant before they are hired, and the other measures the entire amount of time it takes to identify and fill a vacancy. Making note of the difference, both of these KPIs can help identify bottlenecks, challenges, and roadblocks that might be slowing down your recruitment efforts.

3 Ways Recruitment Technology Will Change Hiring in 2025

AI and other new hiring technologies can help you track recruitment metrics and improve outcomes. Learn more about how the right tools can benefit your team in our latest ebook.

3. Source of Hire and Sourcing Channel Efficacy

Source of hire: There are many ways to reach out to new hires, from job boards to recruitment agencies, from social media to your own website. This metric tracks which medium your recruitment efforts are paying off on.
Sourcing channel efficacy: This recruitment KPI lets you measure the conversion rates on each of your recruitment channels, allowing you to compare channels by cost, ROI, and how effective they are at driving hires.

The days of being able to find all the candidates you need by posting on a single job board are a distant memory. Today’s applicants are spread out across thousands of job boards, websites, social media platforms, and other media — making it more important than ever to understand which platforms are reaching the candidates you need. Tracking the source of hire metric can give you a general overview of which platforms you’re successfully reaching candidates on, while sourcing channel efficacy can help you determine if you’re allocating budget to each platform appropriately based on their performance.

4. Hiring Manager Satisfaction and Candidate Satisfaction

Hiring manager satisfaction: More qualitative than quantitative, this recruiting metric still provides useful information — namely, if the hiring manager is satisfied with new employees.
Candidate satisfaction: This metric is the flipside of the one above and tracks whether the expectations you set with your recruitment efforts align with candidates’ actual experience.

Both of these KPIs for recruiting are too often dismissed as “soft” metrics. But high satisfaction levels with both hiring managers and candidates are strongly indicative of longer-term candidate success. Low scores here should prompt a reevaluation of your recruitment strategy because something isn’t lining up.

5. Application Completion Rate and Offer Acceptance Rate

Application completion rate: Another recruitment KPI that is exactly what it sounds like, this metric shows how many applicants who started applying for your job completed the application process.
Offer acceptance rate: This metric compares the number of candidates who received a job offer from your organisation with the number who accepted that offer. You can find this by dividing the number of offers accepted by the number of offers made.

These recruiting metrics are another set of valuable tools that can help identify problems in your hiring efforts. While a low application completion rate points to an issue with your application process — likely that it is too long or complicated — a low offer acceptance rate can be the result of problems in the hiring process or other factors, including a lack of competitive compensation, inflexible work arrangements, or a poor brand reputation.

6. Return on Recruitment Investment

Hiring and onboard costs
Time to hire
Quality of hire
Application completion rate
Offer acceptance rate
Attrition rate
Impact of new hires on revenue and productivity

At the end of it all, you want your recruitment initiatives to create value. Measuring ROI — the costs of your hiring efforts relative to the value your recruitment campaigns generate — can help your team justify your budget and highlight the value you provide (or show that you need to rethink some of your strategies.)

Make Sense of Recruitment Metrics with Hirematic

Hirematic’s omnichannel recruitment marketing platform helps you centralise and streamline hiring efforts while using the power of AI and programmatic computing to convert your recruiting metrics data into actionable insights. Contact us today to learn how we can make your data work for you.