Less than half of firms measure agencies’ performance when hiring permanent staff

Nick Elvin

Forty-four per cent of businesses actively measure the performance of the recruitment agencies they use when hiring permanent staff to ensure they are actually getting value for money, according to research by BrightPool.

And of those employers that do formally evaluate recruiters’ effectiveness, just 25% monitor candidate retention to the end of their probation period as a metric.

In addition, one quarter of those that have measurement systems in place do not evaluate recruiters’ performance in terms of the proportion of the candidates offered a role who actually take up their employment.

Instead, the primary focus is on their delivery of front-end criteria set out in service level agreements – principally their speed and accuracy in identifying suitable candidates at the outset.

Angela Hickmore, managing director of BrightPool said: “Companies are only as good as the people they employ. With such significant levels of investment in recruitment, businesses are missing an opportunity if they don’t actively measure the quality of the agencies they use at all, or crucially, monitor ROI over the medium to longer term.

“Measuring on-going outcomes – such as candidate retention and ongoing career progression – as well as initial inputs like numbers of CVs submitted, is vital if firms are going to see a real return on their investment. Employers need more from their recruitment provider than just plucking names from a database, they need quality candidates cherry-picked who are likely to add value months and years on from their appointment.”

According to the research, all (100%) of those that do currently monitor recruiters’ performance said that the top three critical performance indicators they look at are: the length of time taken to hire each candidate; the amount of suitable CVs submitted to the client resulting in an interview; and the selection of quality interviewees from which to make an employment offer.

The research also showed that for high volume recruitment (for example teams of call centre staff, claims handlers or remediation staff), 56% of firms measure recruiters’ performance.

However, recruiters’ role in terms of maximising the likelihood of staff retention is more important when hiring large numbers of contractors on a contingent basis, with two-thirds of those that have measurement systems in place saying they evaluate this.

Speed to hire, suitability of applicants put forward for interview and choice of quality interviewees from which to make a job offer were all still viewed as the top three priority issues. However, not all respondents measure each of these factors when it comes to high-volume recruiting: for all three the proportion fell to just over 80%.

“When it comes to resource hungry high volume recruitment, churn is major issue,” added Hickmore. “Employers are keen to limit the amount of staff turnover in order to keep recruitment and training costs down and maintain quality and consistency of service, so they are looking for recruits with staying power as well as the right skills. It’s part of the job of a good recruiter to deliver this.

“Given that employers are dealing with recruitment on such a large scale, hiring sometimes hundreds of candidates at a time, you would expect that performance measurement of the recruiters they use to help them would be more widespread.”