Survey: Measuring Sourcing Success in 2008

As economists debate the recession we are/or are not in, companies are tightening their belts and making sure their money is being spent wisely. With this as our backdrop ZoomInfo headed out to the ERExpo and Kennedy Information’s Recruiting 2008 conference to better understand the sourcing function within corporations. First we gathered information and then we put together a panel discussion to talk further about the information, and whether it truly represented what was happening in the industry.

Along the way we came across some very interesting facts:

• 55% of the recruiters surveyed said their company had 1-20 recruiters on staff
• Only 15% reported having over 100 recruiters on staff
• 41% of recruiters reported that their company did not have a dedicated sourcing function
• That 41% say they spend 21-40% of their time sourcing candidates
• Another 28% of the recruiters surveyed said they spend between 41-60% of their time sourcing candidates
• In 2008 80.25% of the recruiters said their overall sourcing budget would either grow or remain flat; only 19.75% believed their budgets would decrease.
• And now the really self serving fact…70% of recruiters spent up to 20K annually sourcing passive candidates (note – ZoomInfo costs less than 20K – I said it was a shameless plug.)

We also asked survey respondents about how metrics are used to track their sourcing success. Here is where we found the most interesting fact:  93% of the respondents said that metrics are used to help define sourcing success but 75% reported that those metrics aren’t tied to how sourcing and recruiting affect the company’s bottom line. So nearly all have metrics in place but only 25% of those that do, tie those metrics to ROI…how then can a recruiting group prove its worth to the company?  How does recruiting justify keeping or increasing their budget if they can’t prove ROI?

This is exactly what we set out to learn more about during Kennedy Information’s Sourcing Summit in Las Vegas:

Notes on sourcing summit:

ZoomInfo is not the only one talking about this topic. At the 2008 ERE Leadership awards all submissions needed to include actual metrics to prove their project’s success. Many of the winners were clearly in the 25% of those that tie their sourcing metrics to their bottom line and see it as a competitive advantage. Harry Greindling in his article “World Class Recruiting” gives solid reasoning behind the need for metrics and the need to tie it to ROI:  “Believe it or not, most staffing functions still can only produce basic measurement data, if any. And those basic measures, such as time-to-fill and cost-per-hire, only describe the operational performance of staffing. They fail at linking staffing performance to business outcomes. The secret to creating meaningful business metrics is simple: the language of business is dollars and cents. Any measure that fails to carry the math all the way through to a dollar impact misses the point.”

I hope the insights we gleaned from the ZoomInfo Sourcing survey and the metrics panel are helpful to you. There is plenty more on the blogs on this topic and I believe it will continue to be a growing part of the recruiting business.

Click here for full survey results.