Hiring metrics are a valuable tool to track the success of your company’s recruitment efforts. In a competitive market, attracting top talent requires attention to every aspect of the hiring process. If you’re not sure where to start, consider some of the following top metrics to track.
Why Track Hiring Metrics?
For small businesses whose staff and budgets are stretched thin, hiring may happen reactively. A position opens, someone posts the old job description, you hastily collect the resumes, and the main metric anyone really focuses on is “Did the position get filled?” But you don’t have to be the size of Google to realize that tracking metrics can help your company be a bit more proactive in developing a hiring strategy.
“Metrics provide a picture of the overall health of an organization’s recruiting process, says recruitment expert Elissa Tucker. “They indicate how well the organization is balancing the need for cost-effective and efficient recruiting with the need to secure the best talent fast, whenever a business need arises.”
For small businesses looking to use their hiring dollars most efficiently, metrics can reveal where to focus their efforts to make the best possible hires within the budget.
Top 4 Hiring Metrics to Track in 2026
1. Time-to-Fill
Time-to-fill measures the number of calendar days it takes to find and hire a new employee. The starting point is typically either the approval of the job opening or the posting of the job description. The endpoint may be either the candidate’s acceptance of your offer or their work start date.
(This metric is different from time-to-hire; that metric measures the experience from the candidate’s perspective. It starts when a candidate applies and ends when they accept an offer.)
Tracking time-to-fill has some important benefits:
- Measures the costs of open positions. Unfilled jobs cost the company both in dollars and in opportunity costs. The uncovered work falls on current employees, compensated either as overtime or comp time. If they start to feel the strain of overwork and under-appreciation, they may become frustrated or burn out, leading to strained relationships. The quality of work may suffer, and, in the worst-case scenario, you end up with more job openings to fill.
- Exposes internal delays. Without tracking, you may not realize that there’s often a long gap between when a job gets approved and when the posting goes live, or that there’s a long delay in communication between potential candidates and members of the hiring team. You’ll learn how long it typically takes to contact candidates, schedule interviews, and extend offers, all of which affect a candidate’s perception of your company. If a preferred candidate has a better experience elsewhere, you may lose out.
- Provides measurable data. Numbers don’t lie, whereas human perception is often mistaken. If you asked four people involved in a recent hiring how long they thought it took, you’d likely get four different answers. The numbers may reveal that you’re much slower than you thought, and light a fire for setting more proactive company policies.
2. Source Effectiveness
The source effectiveness metric reveals which of your recruiting sources yields the best results. Options like LinkedIn, job boards, recruiters, or referrals can all provide potential candidates, but their efficacy can depend on a variety of factors, some of which may even change over time.
To start, record the number of leads you get from each source you use for a job posting. Then note the quality of the leads: how far did they make it in the hiring process? How many interviews did you conduct? Did you extend offers? Were the offers accepted?
Receiving dozens of resumes that lead to no interviews may reveal that either your job posting needs work or that the source isn’t reaching the right candidate.
Employee referrals of unqualified candidates may reveal that your internal communication about the job isn’t detailed enough.
If external recruiters don’t bring you the right candidates, you may need to evaluate that relationship or consider how effectively you’re communicating your needs.
3. Cost Per Hire
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates the average cost per hire at $4,700, and for some companies, it may be up to three times that amount. They estimate that 30 to 40 percent are hard costs (job-posting boards, recruiters) and 60 percent are soft costs (time spent by department managers supporting HR roles).
To measure your cost per hire, account for all the costs your company incurs while hiring a new employee. Some of these may include:
- Job postings
- Advertising
- Recruiter fees
- Internal administrative, hiring, and legal costs
- Travel expenses
- Relocation bonuses
- Company referral incentives
Divide the total by the number of hires in a designated hiring period. This number provides insight into the true cost of hiring at your company, which can inform budget adjustments in either direction.
4. Quality of Hire
Quality of hire may be a more elusive metric to track because it takes time to reveal itself. The broad key drivers of quality of hire include:
- Job fit
- Company fit
- Performance
Talent solutions research at LinkedIn suggests a formula to measure the quality of your new hires, with some suggested factors:
Job Performance score + Ramp-up Time score +
Engagement score + Cultural Fit score
—————————————————– = Quality of Hire
N *
* N = number of factors or indicators
It’s up to you to determine the factors that matter to your company. Once you’ve established that criteria, score them on a scale of 1 to 100 and plug them into the formula to get a measurable statistic. Objectively evaluating new employees in this way gives you insight into whether you rushed the process, settled for a candidate to quickly fill the job, or followed a sound process.
Hiring can feel like an overwhelming process, but it can be made simpler by gathering valuable metrics. The results of your efforts can help you make significant improvements in future hiring endeavors.
Using ApplicantStack offers access to the data you need to keep track of these key hiring metrics. Explore the applicant-tracking system to find out how it can help you take your hiring efforts to the next level.
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