In this presentation Negar Riazati outlines three core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for evaluating the effectiveness of a hiring and screening system. The first KPI is productivity per hire, measured by profit per staff member, which reflects how new employees contribute to the bottom line. She illustrates this with a simple profit‑per‑employee calculation and stresses that a robust measurement system must track individual employee performance. The second KPI is retention, but she reframes it to focus on retaining only productive workers while allowing non‑productive hires to leave, arguing that high overall retention rates can be misleading if they include low‑performers. The third KPI is cost‑per‑hire, encompassing labor, technology, and testing expenses; she notes that rising costs can be justified if they lead to improvements in the first two KPIs. Riazati also highlights the trade‑off between low hiring costs and poor retention, advocating for strategic investment in screening tools. She showcases Performia, a screening platform that can cut resume review and interview time by up to 80%, delivering rapid candidate suitability assessments and generating significant savings, especially for geographically dispersed hiring. Overall, the talk emphasizes a data‑driven, productivity‑centric approach to recruitment, where HR teams must be equipped with metrics and technology to take ownership of hiring outcomes.
Chapters
You know, what are the KPIs of hiring or even screening? So if you want to measure your screening system, there's certain KPIs. And, you know, one of the first ones is actually, is how productive each person that's hired into your organization is. So this is the the key KPI. You know, my hiring team, they hire 100 people for the year. It's like, how productive was each one of those and as a whole? And this is not so easy to measure. If you've got a really good system where every individual employee is measured, it's very easy because then you can go, okay, we hired 100 and 58 of them exceeded their exceeded their production levels, and 22 were just under, and another 20 were way under or worse. And so you can see here we have an 80% success rate. Well, actually we have a 58% success rate. These 22 might pull up, but this is the key indicator. One of the most simplest ways to measure this is just get the number of staff And divide them into the profit and say, okay, in 2011 we had, you know, $82,000 profit per staff member. In 2012 we had $108,000 per staff member. And this is a very crude way to say, you know, my screening system, my hiring must work okay. Because somehow or other, as we added more people to the team, we were able to add more ability to get profit out of each staff member. And of course we can have all sorts of excuses why it doesn't happen— GFCs and competitors and everything else— but ultimately the right hiring— and I can show you many organizations that don't take any of these things into account, they're not interested in external factors, they're just interested is like, can we get the profit per staff member up? And this is a gun HR and hiring team that uses this KPI. And I've got to say, it's an HR team and That really is brazen if they're prepared to go on this and take responsibility for it. Quite often though, the HR team or the hiring team, they're not allowed the tools to be able to really measure this or take full responsibility. The second KPI is retention. And this is an interesting KPI because if we look at the first KPI we had 42% of the staff either didn't reach or didn't get to the benchmark they should have. Or were, you know, were way out on it. So really, do we want to keep those 42 people or 42%? No. No, we want them to leave. So to just say that, oh, we have 91% retention isn't good enough. Because what you should maybe have for 1 or 2 years is 50% retention because you need to weed out a whole bunch of people that aren't producing. And when you have a bunch of people that aren't producing, they actually drag down the people that are trying to produce and getting frustrated. So when we talk retention, what's important is we retained 100% of our productive workforce and we actually lost 100% of our non-productive workforce. This is the ideal scenario. So first you need to be able to measure who's productive and who's not. And then secondly, you need to basically have a strategy that removes the unproductive. Usually if you've got the right pay structures in place and you have the right, you know, HR policies in place, the unproductive people will remove themselves because they either can't afford to work there or they're working in an environment where it's so uncomfortable to not be productive they just leave. And so retention is very interesting and should be measured properly based on production. Because if you lose— if you have a 1,000-man workforce and lose one person, and that one person is the driver for the organization, that could halve the organization's results. That could actually kill the organization. You know, a good example, and time will tell, with what will happen with Apple with Steve Jobs' departure. You know, unfair departure. The 3rd KPI. Is we could say sweat time per hiring or cost per hiring. So what's it costing to hire each person? You know, how much is it costing in labor, overheads, you know, IT screening costs, you know, testing and evaluating system? What's the overall cost per hiring? $1,000. And of course, you know, this should be something that continually decreases, or if it's increasing, it should be because the first 2 KPIs are improving and it's obviously paying for that investment. So some organizations, their cost per hiring is so low but their retention stinks, and it's like they can't hire productive people. So they need to be investing more money per hiring, not less. But of course, When you have a system like we do in Performia where it can cut down the amount of resume reading and checking, it can cut down the amount of interviews, it can very quickly in a few minutes tell you whether you're interested or not interested in a candidate. It's like this labour time can actually be reduced by as much as 80%. And if you've got a dispersed workforce where you're going to be flying all over the world or all over the country to interview people, it can be a huge savings.
