Measuring the Success of Recruiting Efforts and Investments

Over the past two decades, recruiting applications have evolved from back-office applicant tracking systems to very intelligent cloud-based recruiting and recruiting marketing solutions – allowing organizations to engage with more and better candidates while tracking the success of their investments. To achieve key human resources (HR) business goals around time to hire, cost to hire, and employee retention, companies can benefit from integrating measurable business processes with recruiting technology to actively compete for the best talent.

Modernizing Recruiting Processes

For many years, companies moved to “e-Recruiting” systems to make job postings available via the internet and online job posting boards. Many customers were driven more by the goal of moving recruiting to the web than by specific performance goals. The new recruiting solutions allowed them to capture more potential candidates than had previously been possible through traditional methods.

The evolution of recruiting technology, particularly with recruiting marketing functionality, is starting to allow HR organizations to see the limitations of past recruiting strategies and to more proactively measure the business results and demonstrate value. Today, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solutions integrate with social media and are more mobile friendly, making it easier for candidates to apply anywhere from any device, drawing more candidates and higher quality applications than ever before.

A Customer Success Story

I recently spoke with Winnie Chu, Managing Partner at AspireHR, about one of her customers who completed an implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting earlier in 2019 that has led to some very eye-opening results.

AspireHR worked with the Indiana State Personnel Department (INSPD) – an agency that delivers integrated human resources services statewide – to move from a non-SAP recruiting system to SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting (both recruiting management and recruiting marketing). Over the course of several months, in 2018 and early 2019, AspireHR helped the INSPD team transform and transition the state’s recruiting systems.

For INSPD, the addition of job board integration and a vastly improved candidate experience led to immediate benefits when compared to its legacy system. For example, from a volume perspective, INSPD’s legacy PeopleSoft recruiting application drew approximately one million visits to the state’s job board in the previous calendar year. In the first 11 weeks after the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting go-live, INSPD logged more than 444,000 job seeker visits to its site, a figure that would extrapolate to well over two million visits a year. Since this increase was done without the benefit of a marketing campaign to promote the new job board, the increase in visits can be mostly attributed to the added exposure and integration provided by the new solution.

INSPD’s SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Implementation: Measurable Results

Some other early findings from INSPD’s SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting launch include:

• An increase in application completion rate: Over the first few months after go-live, INSPD saw a completion rate of 75%, compared to completion rates in the legacy application of between 50% and 60%. This increase in completion rates was attributed, at least partially, to the improved application process and user experience.
• A strong pool of mobile applicants: The initial results from the Source Tracker tool show that approximately 45% of INSPD’s applicant traffic came from mobile devices. There is no comparable metric from the legacy system since candidates could not previously apply on mobile devices. The SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting rollout has enabled INSPD to reach a platform and user that was previously inaccessible.
• A big reduction in time to hire: Prior to rolling out SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, INSPD averaged around 74 days to complete a hire. While initial results are based on a shorter time period and may normalize a bit over time, they indicate a reduction to fewer than 50 days to complete a hire. Many factors – including candidate experience, job board, social, and search integration, and mobile usability – have combined to produce more efficient and more cost-effective hiring processes.

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

SAP customers should keep the following advice in mind when planning their recruiting strategies:

• Focus on measuring the outcome of recruiting efforts. Customers that have seen the most success from recruiting transformations have relied on the advanced analytics embedded in the solutions that give them up-to-date insights on important measures such as cost per hire, time to fill positions, candidate drop-off, candidate source, and others. These indicators will allow you to see firsthand what is working and what is not and to adjust your strategy or business processes.
• Make sure your recruiting processes are mobile-friendly. Recruiting applications that have a mobile-friendly interface have proven to have a much broader reach when it comes to finding candidates. Job seeker expectations have changed and the platform and technology must change with them.
• Take advantage of integration with external sources. Integrating jobs with external sources like job boards, social networks like LinkedIn, schools, professional associations, and search engines will allow you to increase candidate flow and reach candidates in the right channels.
• Pay attention to candidate experience. Candidates expect a welcoming, easy-to-use career site and user experience. Focusing on candidate experience can reduce hiring time and costs while bringing more targeted prospects.

Following this strategic guidance should help SAP SuccessFactors customers develop successful talent acquisition strategies to increase quality of hire and reduce the overall time and cost of hiring.