Should I Seek Out Customized Hiring Metrics?

Dear Forecaster,
Rather giving you guesstimates of hiring time, cost and quality, I strongly suggest you check and double-check the availability of people near your plant locations who have the skills, knowledge and experience in the jobs and job families you need.

How many have been hired directly in a 50-mile radius in the last year? How many were supplied by local placement firms? Are there community colleges, vo-tech programs and other local sources equipping people with work-related skills?

Have competitors announced plans to move in, or announced layoffs? Try to build an index for availability and difficulty for the roles you are ramping up. Account for variables such as: adding in the timing for when candidates are available, supporting education, re-education and other certification programs, moving and relocation costs, whether the region is a geographic hotspot or if it struggles to attract topnotch candidates.

It is important to know these details upfront. Also, an assessment of the competitive pressures on recruits could significantly impact what you learn from a 'benchmark' of costs, time and quality.
Traditional sources of data include the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, state employment websites/employment offices, local newspapers, chambers of commerce and more. You can search many of these online to reduce time to acquire, but overlooking them risks an important opportunity to calibrate old and new approaches.

And newer approaches abound. You can search and examine aggregators like Indeed, Simply Hired, and now Monster and LinkedIn, by slicing and dicing titles, geography and more. Wanted Technologies offers a workforce analytics service that performs some of the calculations above. CareerBuilder and others are providing similar services. Some of the benchmarks you seek can be found at SHRM, Saratoga Institute, Corporate Leadership Council and national placement firms such as like Manpower, Kelly Services and Randstad US.

The more you confirm your estimates with multiple independent sources and incorporate some intelligence from boots on the ground, the more likely this exercise will not surprise the business leaders … and especially the recruiters who will have to run with it.

Source: Gerry Crispin, CareerXroads, Kendall Park, New Jersey, Sept. 22, 2014.