Companies tend to treat sourcing as one among many activities that the recruiter performs as part of their daily recruitment. The efficiency improvement would come is from more training for recruiters or spending more on sourcing channels.
This is a lost opportunity. Imagine you are a staffing/recruitment firm and could increase your revenue and save cost by treating sourcing as a specialized field within your organization, with long term vision, strategy, roadmap, and milestones. You can think of ways to make this function more effective and the cost/benefit of doing so.
Start from collecting metrics that allow you to measure how this function is performing within your organization and its impact on your margins. You can then iterate on improving the numbers with regular feedback loops.
A few metrics you may want to consider to start with:
Conversion efficiency – The ratio of the number of leads pushed into the recruitment pipeline to the final submission (or the final hire). Reflects the quality of leads your team is able to generate.
Time to first lead – The faster the first lead gets pushed into the pipeline the better. Reflects the efficiency of your sourcing team in servicing new requirements.
Lead frequency – The speed at which leads are generated. Reflects how quickly a requirement can be closed. This directly impacts your margin.
High conversion efficiency + high Lead generation frequency + Low time to first lead => Better margins and better hiring
In addition to the above efficiency metrics, a few interesting ones on cost:
Channel cost per lead – Measuring the channel cost per lead and breaking up the reason for this cost can help you improve on the spend across sourcing channels.
Channel dependency – The ratio of leads generated across various channels. It helps you understand your dependency on specific channels and the cost impact of each channel on your overall cost. Excessive dependence on a few channels increases future risk, especially if the channel cost is high.
Channel cost efficiency – The ratio of the cost per channel to the number of leads/submissions/hires from that channel.
You can think of a few more metrics around cost and efficiency that apply to your organization.
If you start thinking of sourcing as a function and build a coherent strategy around it, you will come up with more numbers to track that make sense for your organization.
Track, measure, course correct and iterate your way to better sourcing…