Key Metrics Every Recruiter Should Be Tracking

For a long time, I measured the success of a hiring process by one thing: whether I filled the role.

And technically, it worked. The position got covered. Case closed.

But over time I realized that's like measuring the success of a surgery by whether the patient survived. Sure, they may have survived, but how did they come out of it? What did it cost? How long did it take? Recruiting without metrics is exactly that: operating blind and settling for the fact that something happened.

Time-to-hire: how long it actually takes you to hire

This was the first metric I learned to track, and the one that has surprised me the most.

It happened to me: I thought the process was going well, and when I sat down to count the days from when the role opened to when the candidate signed, the number hit me hard. Forty days. For a position that wasn't that difficult.

Without that number, you only have intuition. With that number, you have a diagnosis.

Quality of hire: the metric almost nobody tracks

How did they perform in the first 90 days? Were they still with the company a year later? Was the hiring manager satisfied? Those are the questions this metric answers.

I've seen it happen too many times: a successful process that ends in a resignation six months later. If no one is measuring that, no one learns anything. The recruiting team closes the case, the problem gets absorbed by the department, and the cycle repeats.

Offer acceptance rate: what it tells you about your value proposition

If you're reaching the end of the process with strong candidates and several are turning down your offer, there's a problem. And it's not always the salary.

I've seen teams with a very low acceptance rate who had never once asked themselves why. When we started tracking rejections, the answers were eye-opening: the process took too long, the culture wasn't conveyed well, or another company simply moved faster.

Cost per hire: what each new person actually costs the company

This number makes people uncomfortable because it forces them to acknowledge something often taken for granted: recruiting has a real cost. Job postings, tools, team time, interviews, agencies - all of that adds up.

I've seen it become the defining argument for investing in better tools. When you show a director that each hire is costing X, and that with the right tool that cost would drop to Y, the conversation changes completely.

90-day retention rate: the real test

If someone leaves before three months, something went wrong. It might have been the selection process, onboarding, or the role itself. But something went wrong.

What I've learned is that a low 90-day retention rate almost always points to a mismatch between what was promised and what the candidate actually found when they walked in. Measuring this is uncomfortable because it forces accountability. But it's what allows you to actually improve.

At PeachSheet, we work to make that information available without you having to build it from scratch. Because data matters, but only if you're using it.