Recruiting in today’s competitive landscape requires a delicate balance of quality assurance and speed. When recruiters neglect one aspect or the other, they risk hiring candidates that produce a lower Employee Lifetime Value (ELTV), or miss their window of opportunity to hire a top candidate altogether.

Recruitment velocity is an increasingly popular metric used to achieve hiring results. Essentially, it is defined as the measurement of how fast a company is hiring. Drawing from the concept of sales velocity, recruitment velocity takes into account factors such as conversion rate, number of leads and a window of time to gauge the effectiveness of a recruitment pipeline. Whereas sales professionals also take into account deal sizes and the value of an average sale, recruiters need only to consider the number of hires per unit of time.

Increasing recruitment velocity is becoming a number one way for recruiters to optimize and hit their hiring goals.

The application funnel and recruitment velocity: Solving the optimization problem

A recruiter’s application funnel is where all the hiring action takes place – from candidate sourcing and attribution, to converting applicants into hires. As a crucial focus point, the funnel must continuously be optimized for both quality and efficiency.

Recruitment velocity helps recruiters determine the points within a funnel that need special attention in order to continue running at optimal pace. These may include significant conversion points, such as impression-to-visit, visit-to-lead or lead-to-hire.

In order to calculate recruitment velocity at a section of the funnel, recruiters can use the following simple equation:

Although the nature of this formula may lead recruiters to believe that more candidates mean more hires, this isn’t always the case; it’s important to take into account the quality of candidates and leads. Sourcing more candidates can actually be detrimental to hiring processes if those candidates are not likely to convert, or if they offer a low ELTV.

Let’s take a closer look at how recruitment velocity can be monitored to improve conversion rates and ELTV.

Using (and increasing) recruitment velocity to improve the hiring process

As the name suggests, recruitment velocity is primarily focused on speed. Recruiters cannot afford to let several weeks pass between successive sections in the application funnel, as candidates may lose interest and drop out of the process entirely.

Therefore, recruiters must identify friction points in the funnel. Once these areas are identified through data analytics (a Demand-Side Platform tracks this automatically), then recruitment velocity can be calculated and optimized. What areas contain unnecessary bottlenecks that increase conversion times?

Recruitment velocity can help uncovering issues in the following areas:

• Employer branding – A company’s brand and message can make or break the lead generation cycle. Are visitors converting to potential applicants? Is the hiring company’s messaging strong enough to pull in quality visitors quickly?
• Sourcing – This involves everything related to channels and attribution. Are ad placements doing their job and sourcing applicant leads within a reasonable time frame? If so, which areas are producing the strongest numbers? Focusing on the most lucrative channels is one way to instantly increase recruitment velocity.
• Candidate experience – Candidates should be converting along every step of the application process, and within a short time frame. Is the application process seamless and engaging? Recruitment velocity can help illuminate necessary changes in this crucial step of the application funnel.
• Candidate selection – Is the hiring selection process taking longer than necessary? Are top candidates choosing offers from the competition? Perhaps it’s not the quality of an offer that makes the difference, but rather the timeline. Optimized recruitment velocity may save that potential hire.
• ELTV and employee retention – It’s crucial for recruiters to examine the long-term value of those they hire in relation to recruitment velocity. In other words, recruitment velocity shouldn’t be an isolated calculation. The most important ROI for a company is a quality hire who stays onboard, even if acquiring one this means having fewer leads and a lower conversion rate.

Bottomline: Recruitment velocity is a means for recruiters to better understand their application funnels, optimize their processes accordingly and hit their targets faster.

Achieving recruitment goals in today’s competitive hiring landscape is a multifaceted challenge – one that can be better navigated with the right metrics. Recruitment velocity helps recruiters achieve their goals more efficiently, while ensuring their team stays ahead in talent acquisition.

A powerful DSP offers the most direct route to recruitment velocity optimization – whether a team’s goal is to increase leads at a specific point in the funnel, or convert more applicants to hires.

The timeline and efficiency of a recruiter’s application funnel shouldn’t be ignored, especially with major hiring targets on the line. Recruitment velocity is a smart means for ensuring a company’s hiring strategy is on the path towards maximum ROI.

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About Spencer Parra

Spencer Parra is the VP of Product Management for advertising and data products at Radancy. In that capacity, Spencer and his team of product managers, program managers, data scientists, and data analysts work to develop products in a data driven mindset. As the leader of Advertising products, he works to bring a holistic full funnel approach to Radancy’s advertising technology stack with Programmatic Jobs at its foundation. Through data products, he tells the story of media performance via Radancy’s Metrics Gateway and helps ensure data is democratized through Radancy’s unified platform. Spencer came to Radancy from the Perengo acquisition in mid 2019 where he served as Lead Product Manager and a member of the founding team. With Perengo, he worked towards the vision of leveraging the same rigor and concepts from ecommerce advertising technology to the recruitment advertising space. Prior to Perengo, Spencer launched and supported in-app advertising products at Criteo as a solutions engineer. Spencer holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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