Operational benchmarking is not a foreign concept to the hospitality industry.
Hotels all over the world are constantly identifying industry best practices and using those as a target to make recommendations against current company practices. Between tracking occupancy rates, average daily rates, and RevPAR, all of which can be found in the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI™), there are more than a handful of metrics that hoteliers keep their eye on.
What the hospitality industry lacks, however, is this same mentality surrounding their hiring — and it’s cutting into hotelier’s ability to hire competitively in this current labor market.
What are HR metrics?
HR metrics are data points that help businesses track their human capital while measuring the effectiveness of their recruiting initiatives.
7 HR metric examples that will improve your hiring volume
You can’t change what you don’t measure, so we’ve outlined the top seven HR metrics your hotel should start tracking so you can optimize your current hiring process.
1. Time to review
One of the most important metrics that your team can track that directly impacts hiring capabilities is how long your team takes to review applications. In the current hiring market, you need to review applicants as quickly as possible — but it’s not realistic to expect your hiring managers or recruiters to drop what they’re working on to review an application.
Aside from tracking this metric, hoteliers should also mandate turnaround times for application reviews for their hiring personnel. In this market, the status quo appears to be reviewing applications within 48 hours of submission. However, Hireology recommends reviewing applications within 24 hours to increase the chances of adding interested top talent to your team. Recent Hireology data found that almost half (48%) of hotels take more than three days to respond to new applicants, making this one of the key areas to focus on for improvement for many.
2. Process adherence
As smaller, boutique hotels continue to be bought out by larger hospitality groups, measuring process adherence will only become more important. Process adherence, as presented in the Hireology platform, allows you to make sure each location within your brand and each hiring manager on an individual level is following the same hiring process.
But why is it so important to run a uniform hiring process? Adhering to the same hiring process leads to the same consistency of hires across all properties so your guests can expect similar experiences no matter where they lay their head at night.
3. Sponsored job posts health
General job boards are a jungle these days; they’re crowded with more openings than there are job seekers looking for roles. In order to stand out, more and more employers are utilizing sponsored job posts as they pin open roles at the tops of feeds so motivated applicants see it earlier on in their search — but it can be difficult to analyze the health of all your sponsored job posts if your hotel sponsors posts on multiple job boards. With 37% of hoteliers dissatisfied or unaware of the ROI of their job board spend, this is a key metric to hone in on.
Some applicant tracking systems (ATSes), like Hireology, allow you to aggregate all of this data into one dashboard for easy comparisons. You have instant access to how much you’ve spent on your open posts, the average cost per applicant based on your spend, and how many quality applicants are sourced through your sponsored posts. These metrics empower hoteliers to invest in the best performing recruitment channels for their properties so they can make smarter hiring decisions while managing their budgets.
4. Best conversion source
One of the most important HR metrics your hiring team should track is what their best conversion source is. In the Hireology platform, conversion is broken down into the different phases of the hiring process, so users have a clear picture of how many applicants are moved to candidate status, to interview status, and finally to hired status by recruitment channel.
Based on these figures, hoteliers can determine which recruitment channels to invest based on the ROI they’ll receive. It’s important to remember that what works for one property might not yield the same results at another four hours away, so keeping an eye on the performance of each channel on an individual property basis is necessary for optimal results.
5. Time to hire
Another metric relating to speed that should be measured is time to hire. This isn’t how long a role has been vacant, to be clear; it’s how long it takes a candidate to go from applicant submission to offer acceptance. In the hospitality industry, recent Hireology data revealed that 39% of hotels take longer than three weeks to move applicants throughout the entire process — that’s a large portion of properties fighting for the leftovers from the fastest hiring teams.
In order to capture the best talent on the market, hotels need to tighten their hiring processes to a two week maximum for optimal results. This timeline ensures that your team will remain top of mind during the candidate’s continued job search, while also being respectful of candidate expectations. In a survey from last year, hospitality job seekers revealed that over half (57%) would be likely to “ghost,” or unexpectedly drop out from the hiring process with no warning, potential employers if they did not meet their ideal response times. Additionally, 50% of hospitality job seekers find their next role within two weeks of being on the market, so those that are waiting until three weeks or more are missing out on a significant portion of the talent pool.
6. Average time spent in each hiring step
For the ultimate insight on hiring, hoteliers can get granular with their data by looking at the average time present in each hiring step. In this case, the more information, the better. This metric gives transparency into how long individual hiring managers are spending with candidates in each step of the process, based on their actions within platforms like Hireology.
The average time spent in each hiring step is especially useful to identify where bottlenecks are occurring to inform improvement strategies. In order for this metric to be accurate, hiring managers must be held accountable for regularly updating their candidate profiles. This transparency can help build better hiring policies that make considerable impacts on your hotel’s bottom line.
7. Fill rate
Finally, and perhaps the most important metric of all, is the fill rate. In the Hireology platform, the fill rate refers to how many jobs your hotel had open over the past 30 days and how many hires were made for those jobs. This metric is a high level overview of your hiring performance over a month.
Ready to make better hiring decisions at your hotel?
Better hiring decisions start with better HR metrics, but most ATSes charge for access to your own performance data.
Hireology, however, stands apart from its competitors by including this data in your subscription price so there are no hidden costs — just better hiring faster! Schedule a demo today to see our Insights dashboard in action.
