Measure Success – Graduate Recruitment

Measuring Success is important for your Graduate Recruitment Process

It’s essential, with your Graduate Recruitment Campaign, to measure success – especially if you are to improve your outcomes, year-on-year.

Measuring everything isn’t always as beneficial as you may think. If you are time-poor, and thin on resources – which metrics are likely to give you the most meaningful data?

• Offer Rejection Rate

How many offers do you make to Graduates that, subsequently, get turned down? Rejection rates are higher than ever before – our own research suggests that this is partly down to parental influence –and, across all of the 2015/16 Graduate Recruitment Schemes we delivered, average rejection rates stand at 26%. If your level of rejected offers seems to be abnormally high, you should spend some time trying to understand why. This evidence is key to understanding why your offer is less compelling than others.

• Assessment Centre to Offer Ratio

Staying on the topic of offers – how many candidates do you assess, at the final stage of the process, for each role? From previous experience, we work on a ratio of 3 candidates to every one vacancy (3:1). Assessment centres require a large investment of resource, and can prolong the recruitment process. So, if you are inviting far more Graduates to assessment centres than our suggested ratio – perhaps your pre-screening and shortlisting process isn’t working hard enough for you.

• Cycle Times and Withdrawal Rates

As a general rule of thumb: the longer your cycle times, the greater your risk of experiencing a high level of withdrawals. In our experience, Graduate employers who act fast are more likely to keep candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process. So, taking the time to understand the bottlenecks in your Graduate Recruitment Process can help you speed things up – but, be careful not to sacrifice quality at each stage.

• Incomplete Applications

High levels of incomplete applications might be cause for concern. Understanding exactly what is driving this is not easy. However, empathising with your Graduates may help you to pick up on a few things: long, arduous application forms; less than impressive Glassdoor reviews; poor quality recruitment collateral – all of these factors influence how Graduates perceive your company.

So, how successful is your Graduate Recruitment Process?

Determining the success of your Graduate Recruitment Process is important, and assigning specific metrics will help you to understand how well your Graduate Recruitment Process is working. Success can come in many forms – it’s important to first decide what you believe constitutes success, when it comes to your Graduate Recruitment Process, before you begin to measure success.

We’d love to hear how successful your processes are, and which metrics you use to measure this. Let us know in the comments below!

Future- Proofing Graduate Recruitment