Comparing ourselves to others is something human beings have been doing since the beginning of time.  At some level, we all need validation that our efforts are on par with those who have similar jobs and responsibilities.

If you are responsible for recruiting agents, have you ever sought to compare yourself to other offices within your company?  Is your company doing as well as your competitors?  How does your recruiting performance stack up to companies in other markets?  These are all important questions.  Hopefully you’ve spent some time contemplating and researching this issue.

One of the things you may not have studied is how your recruiting efforts compare to other industries.  Is it possible that the real estate industry operates at one level, but the insurance industry operates on a higher performance plane?  On the other hand, you could be pleasantly surprised to learn that your hiring systems and performance far surpass typical performance in the medical industry.

Of course, this type of data is very difficult to collect and analyze.  So, when I came across the question below and subsequent answer on this topic in the Electronic Recruiting Exchange (ERE), I thought it was worth sharing.  The contributor is Richard Newsom, the VP of Recruiting Operations for Fifth Third Bank, and the question is shared by an anonymous reader who works for a publically-traded company.  Here is the exchange:

“Question:

I manage our company’s recruiting organization.  We are a four billion dollar company, publicly traded, and employ 4,000+ employees.  I have a team of seven full-time recruiters and just recently brought on two contract recruiters.  Here is my challenge:

I am being asked to show that my team is at capacity, and what it would take to complete the recruiting team to address the business needs (requisitions).  When I joined the company two years ago, we had 15 recruiters.  In the last two years we have had three reductions in force, hiring freezes, etc.  It made sense for the company to decide that we could downsize the recruiting organization.  Last year with seven recruiters, we filled 774 requisitions.  Is there anyone who could help me build a business case that we are working at capacity?

Answer:

There are many different ways to approach this, and not every solution works for every company.  I’d like to discuss one particular approach….  Using your example of 774 hires (and making some broad assumptions that you’ll need to validate)…

Assumptions:

• We need to hire 774 people in 2011
• 90% of the offers extended result in a hire
• 25% of the interviews conducted result in an offer
• 80% of the candidates submitted to a hiring manager get interviewed
• It takes 1.5 hours to source a candidate worthy of submitting to a hiring manager
• Each recruiter has 2.5 hours per day dedicated to sourcing candidates for submission
• There are seven recruiters dedicated to recruiting throughout 2011 — thus seven recruiters X 2.5 hours per day for sourcing = 17.5 sourcing hours per day total

Calculations:

• 774 hires needed/90% acceptance rate = 860 offers need to be extended
• 860 offers/25% offer rate = 3,440 candidates need to be interviewed
• 3,440 interviews/80% interview rate = 4,300 candidates who need to be submitted to hiring managers
• 4,300 submissions X 1.5 hours per candidate = 6,450 sourcing hours needed
• 6,450 sourcing hours needed/17.5 hours per day = 369 business days to source all candidates (516 calendar days)

Using these assumptions, it would take your team of seven recruiters nearly a year and a half to fill all 774 positions….”

Hopefully, this recruiter will be able to take this information and fend off another reduction of staff among her recruiting group. Even if she maintains here current staffing level, I’m not sure I’d want to work there—it sounds like a death march!

But, that’s not the point.  Through his assumptions, Richard Newsom has given us some insight into hiring practices in the banking industry.  In essence, we have the opportunity to look in his office window and see the recruiting conversion metrics of one of the most prominent companies in the financial industry.

How do these benchmarks compare to what you experience in your company?  For high performing companies in the real estate industry, we commonly see an interview-to-hire ratio of 25% to 35%.  While this is similar to Newsom’s bank, their candidate-to-interview ratio is very high compared to most real estate companies.  To secure 3,440 interviews, most real estate companies would need to source 15,000 to 20,000 candidates.  Analyzing the hours dedicated to each task is even more interesting, but I’ll leave that for you to consider on your own…

The bottom line is that we all need goals in order to exceed.  If these goals are set with a limited exposure to what others are accomplishing, we may not reach high enough.  I encourage you to use all the information you can possibly collect to establish your personal expectations, and then push yourself to succeed.

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Editor’s Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.