management

8 Recruitment OKRs for Hiring and Retaining the Best Talent

The talent acquisition team within a business or enterprise is responsible for effective recruitment – identifying the requirements, strategizing recruitment strategy, screening the applications, shortlisting the candidates, and selecting the right individuals for the right positions. 

Without a proper strategy, recruitment can become challenging. Therefore, the recruitment team should set clear and attainable OKRs to measure performance. Recruitment OKRs can help recruitment teams understand, meet, and exceed business expectations.

In this article, we will outline OKRs that can support recruitment and talent acquisition teams to exceed business expectations.

Focus Area: Openings Announcement and Advertising Practices

Marketing not only works for sales or purchases, but it can also optimize recruitment strategies. The recruiters in an organization are responsible for collecting requirements, gathering information, and preparing posts for open positions. The process involves identifying employee demands, understanding market trends, and visualizing company interests. 

With careful observation, planning, and implementation, recruiting teams can create top-notch job descriptions. With a proper plan, HR teams can enhance the quality and quantity of job applications. Recruiters must work closely with marketing experts to identify growth areas and define effective techniques.

Objective: Improve Job Descriptions

  • Key Result: Create standard job description templates for common open roles
  • Key Result: Improve job description authoring process into a collaborative workflow between the hiring manager and recruitment liaison
  • Key Result: A/B test job descriptions

Objective: Plan an Effective Marketing Strategy

  • Key Results: Improve company reputation by sharing 40% of employee testimonials
  • Key Results: Update the company’s career website every quarter with new achievements and testimonials from employees.Key Results: Work on increasing page views to the company’s careers website by 30% month-over-month

Focus Area: Talent Search and Marketing

Looking for the right individual can often be like searching for a needle in the haystack for the HR team. The hiring process is crucial for the HR department. Ineffective or improper hiring schemes can affect the productivity and reputation of the company. 

The search process should involve practical procedures and modern platforms to improve efficiency. Talent acquisition team can set OKRs to facilitate talent acquisition and find the best candidates for positions.

Objective: Improve Hiring Process

  • Key Results: Hire 20 employees by the end of a quarter
  • Key Results: Achieve a 7:4 ratio between interviewed and selected candidates 
  • Key Results: Design and send a survey to each applicant to solicit feedback on the hiring process, irrespective of whether they were hired or not

Objective: Create an Online Outreach Drive (to Hire Candidates)

  • Key Result 1: Update the company careers web page every month to drive a 10% increase in online applications
  • Key Result 2: Design workflow to post 100% of open positions on LinkedIn Jobs
  • Key Result 3: Target 50 hires via an online platform such as LinkedIn and Stackoverflow

Focus Area: Time and Cost Management

Time management is critical to success in almost every field. Talent acquisition and recruitment teams require time-saving techniques to boost productivity and optimize performance.

Similarly, cost management is also important for all departments of an organization. Recruitment leaders must handle and balance the costs of advertising, selecting, and hiring candidates. Time and cost management OKRs can help recruiters track and control the cost of recruitment by visualizing and administering the execution.

Objective: Minimize Time Spent During the Hiring Process

  • Key Result 1: Gather candidate information and review profile records within 5 days
  • Key Result 2: Send feedback to the candidate within 2 weeks of conducting the interview
  • Key Result 3: Provide no hire candidate feedback within 24 hours of the interview
  • Key Result 4: Reduce the time to accept the job offer to 2 weeks

Focus Area: Candidate Selection Process

HR specialists aim to hire potential candidates with adequate experience and relevant qualifications. Recruiters can set related OKRs and adopt relevant practices to hire top performers.

Individuals from various geographical regions, having different cultures and languages, can add great value to the firm. Recruiters must devise ways to hire employees from different backgrounds and a mix of expertise. They should make efforts to develop healthy employee connections, ensure the protection of employee rights, and build safe workplace culture.

Objective: Hire top-tier talent

  • Key Result 1: Arrange job fairs in 70% of top institutes within 6 months
  • Key Result 2: Connect with 10 field experts through online profiles and send them customized offers
  • Key Result 3: Conduct online interviews to accommodate and target remote applicants by 50%

Focus Area: Improve Post-Selection Process

The majority of recruitment teams entirely focus on finding and interviewing candidates. Actual work begins after shortlisting applicants, from preparing proposals to receiving responses. Top candidates are usually in high demand and respond well to quick turnaround times. 

The onboarding process greatly reflects the company policies and the employer’s attitude. Individuals can foresee their future and understand what to expect from the firm. Employees often leave within the first three months due to poor onboarding experience. Therefore, recruiters must perform post-selection tasks diligently and quickly to secure talented individuals.

Objective: Improve Post-Selection Candidate Experience

  • Key Result: Generate final feedback within 48 hours of an interview
  • Key Result: Inform shortlisted candidates via emails within 2 weeks
  • Key Result: Send job offers to selected candidates within 1 week of selection
  • Key Result: Increase job offer acceptance rate by 75% by the end of the year

Objective: Revamp Onboarding Practices

  • Key Result: Reduce the onboarding process duration from 2 weeks to 1 week
  • Key Result: Ensure 100% of new employee enrollment in the induction training program
  • Key Result: Welcome 100% of new hires by decorating their desk spaces
  • Key Result: Increase the employee onboarding satisfaction score by 70%
  • Key Result: Gather feedback from 60% of new hires to understand and fix onboarding gaps

Conclusion

Recruiters can play a significant part in providing potential assets to the company. From collecting requirements for a vacant position to facilitating new hires, recruiting teams have multiple roles. It is easy to lose track of progress in this vicious cycle. Therefore, with properly defined OKRs, recruitment and talent acquisition teams can measure performance metrics and observe the outcomes.

Further Reading

14 OKRs for HR to improve employee satisfaction