The 7 Recruiting Metrics Worth Tracking (And the Ones to Ignore)

Measure the funnel, not the activity

The mistake most small teams make is measuring recruiter activity — emails sent, candidates contacted, LinkedIn InMails. Activity metrics make people look busy. Funnel metrics tell you whether you're actually going to close the role.

The 7 that matter

1. Time to hire — days from job opened to offer accepted. Benchmark: ~44 days globally (LinkedIn 2024). Over 60 starts losing strong candidates.

2. Time in stage — days a candidate sits in each pipeline stage. Anything over 10 days in Screen or Interview is a process problem, not a candidate problem.

3. Source of hire — which channel produced the people you actually hired. Different from where most applicants come from; this is the conversion-weighted version.

4. Offer acceptance rate — accepted ÷ extended. Below 80% means you're misreading candidate intent or under-pricing offers.

5. Pass-through rate per stage — what % of Screens become Interviews, what % of Interviews become Offers. Identifies where your funnel actually leaks.

6. Cost per hire — total spend (job boards, agency fees, recruiter time) ÷ hires. We have a free cost of hire calculator.

7. Quality of hire at 6 months — manager rating of new hires after six months. The only metric that tells you if your pipeline is selecting the right people, not just any people.

Vanity metrics to ignore

Total applicants. Resumes screened per week. LinkedIn InMails sent. Job posts published. These measure motion, not progress. A pipeline with 400 applicants and zero hires is worse than a pipeline with 20 applicants and one signed offer.

Where to track them

If you're a small team, you can compute most of these in a single Excel pivot table from your tracker. Recruit Flow computes them automatically from your candidate data — time-to-hire, source-of-hire, pass-through rate, and stage-aging are built into the analytics tab so you don't have to maintain formulas as your pipeline grows.