“We were hitting our numbers, but there was such a big hole in the bucket.”
“People were leaving quickly, and the hole just kept getting bigger. We were constantly playing catch-up.”
Your recruitment team just delivered another great month. Targets hit, roles filled, headcount gaps closed. And your spreadsheet? It looks perfect.
So why does it feel like you’re losing?
It’s likely a familiar tale. Across contact centres, logistics hubs, and high-volume operations, hiring teams are discovering a brutal truth: traditional high volume recruiting metrics mean nothing when people keep walking out the door.
Most recruitment metrics focus on one thing: getting people through the door. Time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, vacancy rates.
But what happens when those carefully tracked hires become next month’s leavers?
The problem isn’t the metrics themselves – it’s what we’re not doing with them. Too many teams collect data for the sake of it, building dashboards that look impressive but change nothing.
When was the last time your recruitment metrics changed how you work?
(No, seriously).
We spoke with a talent acquisition team who told us they needed to present real-time changes in recruitment activity, but they couldn’t.
“The information in our ATS wasn’t giving us an understanding of which sources were working. We were collecting data but not using it strategically.”
This is where most recruitment agencies fall short. They’ll give you beautiful charts showing applications and interviews, but can they tell you why your new starters are leaving within weeks?
Do they track which recruitment sources lead to better retention?
Are they measuring candidate experience in ways that predict long-term success?
The uncomfortable reality is you can’t hire your way out of a retention problem.
More bums on seats doesn’t fix why they’re leaving. Yet most high volume recruiting metrics still reward volume over value, speed over sustainability.
High attrition can often mean that the business isn’t listening to candidate feedback – or worse, isn’t asking for it in the first place. If people keep leaving for the same reasons, those signals are being ignored. The real problem might be unknown (which is a problem in itself) or known but not being acted upon.
We spoke to a team that was tasked with increasing the number of hires and building a funnel to get diverse, higher-quality applicants that would “improve our very poor retention rate,”. The main word here is quality.
But how many recruitment providers measure that?
When retention suffers, recruitment teams often become the scapegoat. But here’s the thing: culture, pay, workload, management style… recruitment can flag these issues, but they can’t fix them.
You could deliver the perfect candidate, but if that person walks into a toxic environment or discovers the role isn’t what was promised, whose fault is that really?
Yet recruitment gets blamed when the real culprits – broken onboarding, unrealistic expectations, poor management – go unchallenged.
We’re seeing a trend in Talent Acquisition teams moving beyond reactive firefighting to strategic workforce planning. There are many recruitment metrics to report on, but we find that to take the strategic approach, you need to shift.
This shift requires different metrics – ones that span hiring, HR, and operations.
Instead of just measuring speed and volume, try these instead:
The best recruitment partners don’t just measure what matters – they measure what matters to you and where you’re going. It’s what we offer as part of our high-volume hiring strategy. It isn’t reporting; it’s intelligence.
They should be asking: which sources deliver candidates who stay? What patterns predict early leaving? How does candidate experience correlate with long-term success? Are we measuring the right things to drive the right behaviours?
If your current provider can’t answer these questions, or if they’re still focused purely on hire numbers while your retention rates crater, it might be time to ask: are they really doing their job?
The goal isn’t perfect metrics – it’s useful ones. Metrics that help stretched talent teams ditch the firefighting and lead strategically.
When recruitment success is measured properly, everyone wins: candidates, businesses, and the talent teams who can finally focus on the work they truly enjoy.
