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At the halfway point of the year, HR leaders and talent acquisition teams face a crucial question: Is our hiring strategy working? A mid-year recruitment check is more than just an administrative step—it’s an opportunity to course-correct, optimize, and prepare for the workforce demands of the second half of the year.
Conducting a thorough mid-year check is essential for aligning your hiring strategies with organizational goals.
Mid-Year Recruitment Check: Assessing Your Hiring Strategies
This mid-year check provides insights into the effectiveness of your current hiring efforts and areas needing attention.
Whether you’re scaling rapidly or tightening budgets, evaluating your recruitment metrics ensures your hiring efforts are aligned with business goals, efficient in execution, and producing top-quality hires.
Performing a mid-year check enables teams to pivot and adapt to changing market needs effectively.
Monitoring metrics during your mid-year check ensures that your processes remain efficient and effective.
In this article, we’ll break down 10 essential hiring metrics every HR team should review mid-year. By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap for measuring recruitment success and identifying areas for improvement.
1. Time to Fill
Time to fill is one of the most widely used recruiting KPIs—and for good reason. It tracks the number of days between when a job is posted and when a candidate accepts the offer.
Why It Matters:
A lengthy time to fill can mean lost productivity, higher costs, and frustrated hiring managers. Conversely, rushing the process may lead to poor-fit hires.
Mid-Year Action Step:
Optimizing your metrics through a mid-year check can lead to more successful hires.
- Benchmark time to fill by department and role type.
- Identify bottlenecks in your pipeline (e.g., slow interview scheduling or delayed feedback loops).
- Invest in tools that automate early-stage screening.
The results of a mid-year check should influence your future hiring plans.
Performing a recruitment check means taking a proactive approach to hiring.
Utilizing insights from a recruitment check can optimize hiring costs.
2. Cost Per Hire
This metric calculates the average cost your company incurs to hire one employee. It includes job ads, agency fees, background checks, software licenses, and internal labor costs.
Why It Matters:
With budget scrutiny rising, understanding cost per hire helps HR leaders justify spend and identify high-ROI sourcing channels.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Audit current spend by channel.
- Look for opportunities to reduce costs via referrals, employer branding, or internal mobility programs.
If you want to improve your acceptance rate, consider conducting a mid-year recruitment check.
3. Offer Acceptance Rate
A comprehensive mid-year check reveals the effectiveness and efficiency of your hiring practices.
Offer acceptance rate = (Number of offers accepted ÷ Number of offers extended) × 100
Why It Matters:
A low acceptance rate could signal misalignment between the role and candidate expectations, compensation issues, or poor communication during the offer stage.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Track decline reasons and categorize them.
- Improve pre-offer alignment with candidates through more transparent conversations and realistic job previews.
- Collaborate with hiring managers to ensure competitive offers.
Each recruitment check should evaluate how hiring aligns with broader company goals.
Understanding trends over time requires a thorough recruitment check.
Consider a mid-year recruitment check to evaluate your team’s performance and hiring strategies.
Tracking performance metrics is essential in a mid-year recruitment check.
4. Quality of Hire
Perhaps the most important—but also the most complex—recruiting KPI, quality of hire measures how well new hires perform and contribute post-hire.
Why It Matters:
High-quality hires drive performance, reduce turnover, and improve team dynamics. But the value of this metric lies in its long-term impact, not just immediate performance.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Implement a post-hire survey at 90 and 180 days to assess new hire satisfaction, performance, and cultural fit.
- Combine manager feedback, retention data, and performance ratings to build a composite score.
5. First-Year Turnover / Early Attrition
This metric tracks the percentage of employees who leave within their first 6–12 months on the job.
Why It Matters:
Early attrition can be expensive and demoralizing. It often points to missteps in hiring, onboarding, or team integration.
Next, implement changes based on the findings from your recruitment check.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Analyze turnover by department and job level.
- Conduct exit interviews focused on early leavers.
- Enhance onboarding programs with clearer expectations and support structures.
Use your mid-year check to drive new initiatives and strategies moving forward.
6. Sourcing Channel Effectiveness
Not all sourcing channels are created equal. This metric examines which sources (e.g., job boards, LinkedIn, employee referrals) produce the best candidates based on quality, cost, and conversion rates.
Why It Matters:
Knowing where your top hires come from helps optimize recruitment marketing spend and recruiter focus.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Categorize hires by source and track performance.
- Shift spend toward top-performing channels and reduce underperformers.
- Test emerging platforms (like niche job boards or industry-specific communities).
7. Candidate Experience Score
Your candidates are evaluating you just as much as you’re evaluating them. Candidate experience can make or break your employer brand.
Why It Matters:
A poor experience—delays, lack of communication, or impersonal interviews—can discourage top talent and hurt your reputation on sites like Glassdoor.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Introduce brief post-interview surveys using an NPS (Net Promoter Score) format.
- Analyze feedback on timeliness, professionalism, and communication.
- Share feedback with recruiters and hiring managers to encourage improvements.
8. Recruiter Productivity
Productivity metrics assess how effective your recruitment team is at managing workloads and delivering results. These may include:
- Number of hires per recruiter
- Requisition load
- Average time spent per stage
Why It Matters:
Overloaded recruiters are more likely to cut corners, miss opportunities, and burn out—leading to decreased hiring quality.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Review recruiter workload by requisition type and complexity.
- Set performance benchmarks (e.g., time to shortlist, interview-to-offer ratio).
- Invest in automation or training to improve efficiency.
9. Diversity Hiring Metrics
Companies committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion must track representation throughout the hiring funnel—not just at the offer stage.
Why It Matters:
Tracking diversity hiring metrics helps ensure equitable hiring practices and supports broader DEI goals.
Mid-Year Action Step:
- Analyze applicant and hire demographics.
- Evaluate each stage of the funnel for drop-off rates by demographic group.
- Ensure job ads use inclusive language and interview panels are diverse.
10. Hiring Manager Satisfaction
The hiring manager is your internal customer. Their feedback can reveal a lot about process alignment, communication, and candidate quality.
Why It Matters:
Dissatisfaction may indicate misalignment between recruiting and business needs.
Ultimately, a successful mid-year check will lead to better hiring outcomes.
- Implement a post-hire feedback loop after each hire.
- Ask about quality of shortlist, communication, and role fit.
- Use scores as a recruiter performance input and coaching opportunity.
Whether you’re scaling up or tightening resources, these insights will help you make smarter, faster, and fairer hiring decisions for the rest of the year. Need help? Rave Health has you covered!
