Metrics and KPIs: A Guide for Measuring and Reporting in TA

Recruiting metrics get thrown around constantly, but not all of them tell the truth, and some actively reward bad behavior. A conversation among talent acquisition practitioners breaks down which numbers matter, which ones get gamed, and how to build a reporting approach that actually helps a business make decisions.

Core measures discussed include:

• Time to fill and time to hire, and why they can be manipulated by recruiters closing and reopening requisitions, or reported without agreeing on when the clock starts and stops.
• Average days open, a companion metric that shows real-time exposure for revenue-critical or risk-related roles still sitting unfilled.
• Source of hire, with a caution against tracking dozens of granular channels and instead running A/B tests, such as comparing paid social platforms or geo-targeted campaigns, to see what actually produces applicants.
• Quality of hire, built from performance, engagement, and retention data, measured at set intervals such as six months and one year after start, and dependent on having a standardized, role-appropriate interview and job description process.
• Quick quit rate, tracking early attrition at set intervals (ninety days, one-eighty days, one year) as a check against hiring managers or recruiters optimizing purely for speed.
• Impact of hire, weighing not just whether someone stays but whether they improved systems, efficiency, or culture, versus someone who stayed but caused harm.
• Hiring manager experience surveys, sent after every requisition closes, asking about candidate pool quality, communication, and interview panel readiness, then broken down by department to spot where the process is failing.
• Time to offer and ramp-up time, useful once core metrics are stable, to help plan hiring timelines around when a new hire will actually start producing results.

Also covered: why reducing time to fill without checking quick-quit rates can mask a serious problem, why rewarding recruiters for speed alone creates the wrong incentives, and why a simple pull of first-year performance reviews can substitute for a formal survey when building a quality-of-hire baseline. The overall approach favors starting with one or two headline numbers, then digging into the underlying causes, rather than tracking dozens of metrics without a clear story.