Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

Chapter 8. Measuring Staffing—A Better Approach to Hiring Metrics

As human capital management continues to be a major business imperative, providing a framework for making good decisions regarding such human assets is becoming essential. As mentioned in Chapter 3, underlying human capital decision science are the methodologies, systems, and tools, including the metrics that support the decision making process as it relates to human capital and the impact to the organization. However, a decision framework for understanding the human component of an organization’s asset base is still relatively new and has only recently received significant attention.

Most decisions regarding the investments a company makes to acquire, deploy, develop, or retain its human capital are still primarily based on internal Human Resources efficiency metrics and are of limited value in supporting human capital decision making by the rest of the organization. Efficiency-type measures typically gauge the performance of Human Resources functions or processes, such as staffing, and although important, are generally not tightly aligned with the mission of the organization. They focus on identifying the level of human resource programs generated for a given investment of resources—like time and money—and tend to be numbers driven. Typical examples of these staffing metrics include vacancy/fill rates, internal cycle times, and cost-per-hire or other cost elements. These measures help identify issues that need ...