6 Essential Metrics to Manage Your Business

The number of days a job is available and unfilled.

Date job requisition is filled subtracted from the date the job is opened.

Time-to-fill is an essential big-picture metric for measuring the speed and efficiency of your recruiters. A poor time-to-fill rate suggests potentially serious operational efficiencies that could be costing your firm money. So many factors contribute to time-to-fill that it shouldn’t be used as a stand-alone metric. If your time-to-fill is subpar, examine the activities in the performance metric checklist to discover a potential weak spot.

The percentage of total job orders that a firm has successfully filled.

Job orders filled divided by job orders received.

Fill rate is another efficiency measure that helps you understand if your firm is making the most out of its present opportunities. Because total placements are crucial to your firm’s overall revenue, improving your fill-rate can is vital to remaining profitable. Achieving a more efficient fill rate is often an easier fix than increasing the total number of job orders.

Ratios are a statement of how two numbers compare.

A candidate placement is the result of a long chain of actions. If any link in the chain is weak, it severely impacts the outcome. Ratios allow you to analyze every stage of the process to determine any potential inefficiencies.

The five metrics below represent a fundamental stage in an eventual candidate placement. Track the relationship between each of the metrics to discover if there’s an unusual drop-off between any two stages.

Examples:

1. Client Submission Count
2. Internal Submission Count
3. Job Count 
4. Interview Count 
5. Placement Count

The rate a staffing firm charges a company for the services of a worker.

Pay-rate times (1+mark-up)

The bill rate directly correlates with your firm’s profit margin. Because bill rate differs by account, it can strongly indicate which clients are most and least profitable. The bill rate is one of the most delicate and powerful ways to affect your bottom line and should be scrutinized accordingly.

The amount of money a staffing firm retains after paying labor and statutory expenses.

Gross margin equals bill rate minus direct cost of labor.

If your margins aren’t good, then your business is struggling. Your gross margin reveals important insights into which clients are most profitable and require too many resources for too little return. Nearly everything affects your firm’s margins, so monitor this metric closely as you implement any changes to your business strategy.