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Sourcing Metrics: 5 Essential KPIs to Track

Published Date
Author Kirsty Cooke

Everyone has a rough idea of what successful sourcing entails — it’s finding candidates that fit the requirements of open roles, right?

Unfortunately, there’s a big leap between this initial idea and a sourcing operation that’s humming with efficiency. Sourcing as a concept might seem simple, but if you’re not monitoring your team’s performance and keeping an eye on crucial sourcing KPIs, then you could be in for a couple of nasty surprises down the line.

Traditional recruiting metrics don’t give you the level of insight into the sourcing process that you really need. If you want to understand how you’re actually performing, try tracking these five things:

1. Best sources for new candidates

Where do the best candidates come from?

It might not be a question that you can answer right away (and it will differ for each organization and industry), but after tracking your sourcing process for a few months, you should have a very clear idea of where to find great candidates for different roles.

Superstar sales reps could be lurking on LinkedIn; top designers on Dribbble. You might find that all of your best technical candidates come from attending industry meetups.

Make sure you keep track of the source of every candidate in your Talent CRM and keep an eye on the most effective talent sources. If you can build up a clear picture of where top talent is hanging out, then you can optimize where your team spends their time and resources.

2. Your pipeline speed (time-to-hire for sourcing)

A slight alteration on the classic ATS time-to-hire metric, tracking the speed of your pipeline will show you how long it typically takes for candidates to go from the “first contacted” stage to “hired”.

A sourced candidate’s time-to-hire needs to be tracked from the moment that you first contact them, not when they enter your ATS.

This is because there is an entire process of outreach, nurture and qualification that a sourced candidate goes through before they’re ready to apply. By tracking pipeline speed, you’ll get insight into how efficient and effective your team is at this part of the process.

This sourcing metric will show you:

  • How many messages it typically takes to get an initial response from a candidate
  • How long it takes to nurture a candidate and convince them to apply for an open role
  • Whether candidates that you’ve sourced move through the screening and interview process faster than general applicants

3. Sourcing productivity

Efficiency and productivity are paramount to the success of your sourcing team. You need everyone firing on all cylinders if you’re going to compete for the best talent in the market.

To make sure that they’re always operating at peak capacity, the best teams track sourcing metrics like:

  • Number of candidates sourced
  • Number of emails sent
  • Number of calls made
  • Number of candidates progressed to screening

There are three key benefits to tracking these particular sourcing KPIs:

Efficiency

As a manager, it’s important to know how your team is getting on. Tracking productivity as a KPI helps you make sure that everyone is pulling their weight.

It’s crucial to strike a balance here — no one wants to feel like they’re being micromanaged. If you can help your team understand how they can be more efficient in a constructive and positive way, you’re well on your way to success.

Conversion rate benchmarking

Tracking each of the sourcing metrics we’ve covered will show you the conversion rates you can expect at every stage of your sourcing process.

This helps make the sourcing process far more predictable and helps you set clear goals for your team. For example, increasing the percentage of candidates that respond to your first message from 25% to 35% would encourage your team to write more personalized messages and result in a significant increase in candidates in your pipeline.

Forecasting

If you know how many calls, InMails and emails it takes to produce the required number of qualified candidates, then you can forecast far more accurately and make your sourcing process much smarter.

4. Quality of screening feedback

Sourcing is a quality game. It’s not about quantity.

It doesn’t matter how many people your team adds to your pipeline every week if the standard is poor. To make sure your team is identifying the right kind of candidates, you should focus on metrics that are indicators of quality.

A simple way to measure quality? Track screening feedback from your recruiters.

Candidates that your team sources have already been vetted to some degree (you’ve reviewed their information on sites like LinkedIn, Github and Dribbble), and should be great potential matches for open roles. You’ve cherry-picked these candidates — they aren’t untargeted applications.

If your team is finding high-quality candidates, then you’ll get positive feedback from recruiters that are handling the initial screening calls.

On the other hand, if the candidates you’ve found can’t make it through the screening process, then you need to take a good hard look at your sourcing process. It might be a good idea to even sit down with your team to ensure that they know exactly which persona(s) they are looking to match.

5. Candidate experience

It isn’t just your applicants that you have to worry about. When your sourcers engage new candidates, they’re representing your organization. This is the only real window into your company that a candidate has at this stage, and the outcome is determined by the way your sourcing team treats them.

As humans, we form first impressions fast. It takes about seven seconds for us to make up our minds. Online, there’s little to no difference. If you get an InMail from a company that has clearly done no research, and has no idea if you’re actually a good fit for their role, you’re probably not going to think too highly of them.

Here are a three very simple rules to ensure you provide a good candidate experience when sourcing:

  • Send personalized messages and don’t spam
  • Do your research on each individual candidate
  • Follow up, but make sure you get your follow-up strategy right

None of these rules are rocket science, but they can help you make the candidate experience a key part of your sourcing strategy and process.

If you want to actually measure the candidate experience as a sourcing metric though, your best bet is to actually ask the candidates you’re speaking to. You’ll be surprised at how willing people are to provide candid feedback on how their experience has been with your company.

The easiest way to do this is to send simple surveys to candidates that let them rate your process and leave helpful feedback.

There are plenty of great survey tools out there, but here are a few we would recommend:

Unfortunately, none of these sourcing metrics are silver bullets. What you will find though, is that if you track these sourcing KPIs for a few months, you’ll start to get real insights into your process that you can apply to improve your results over time.

One way to improve your sourcing and recruiting metrics is to improve the efficiency of your sourcing and recruiting teams. A full-service Talent Lifecycle Management solution is a great place to start.