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ContentsIntroduction 3

Historical Metrics 4

Summary 5

1. Time to Fill 6

2. Activity Ratios 7

3. Won/Loss 8

Real-Time Metrics 9

Summary 10

1. Activities 11

2. Open Job Orders 12

3. Bookings Trajectory 13

Predictive Metrics 14

Summary 15

1. Sales Forecast 16

2. Active Placements 17

3. Open Job Orders by Employee 18

Conclusion 19

Introduction // 3

IntroductionIf you’re like most staffing firms, you know that you need to rely more on metrics and analytics to ensure your firm is performing in all of the key areas. And if you’re like most staffing firms, you might not know the best place to start this process.

This is natural: Adopting a metrics-driven mindset (let alone a metrics-driven culture) is thought to be time-consuming and difficult to master. But this doesn’t have to be the case. The truth is that running your staffing firm by the numbers is not nearly as difficult as it seems at first.

The key is to start with the fundamentals. What role do metrics play? What are the es-sential types of staffing metrics? How can I use KPIs to tell a coherent story about my company’s performance?

In this eBook, we will explore these 3 types of metrics and explain how tracking them over time can give you a broader understanding of your business and help you understand:

• The 3 essential historical metrics that tell the story behind the numbers• The 3 real-time metrics that will help you make better daily decisions• The 3 predictive metrics that will help prepare you for what’s to come in your business

Historical Metrics // 4

Chapter // 1

Historical Metrics

Historical Metrics // 5

Summary

Your past performance says a lot about what you can expect from the future. This is especially true for the staffing and recruiting industry because trends and patterns often repeat over time.

This is where historical metrics come in. Win rate, time to fill, placement ratios: These are all things that can help staffing leaders identify problems and make the right decisions to keep performance increasing over time. Unlocking your firm’s historical data allows you to translate past performance into actionable insights so you can draw the right conclusions about your business and drive growth.

In this chapter, we look at the 3 most important historical staffing metrics:

• The Time to Fill metric that shows how your placement cycle has changed over time• Activity Ratios that indicate how well your team’s efforts convert into results• The Won/Loss metric that shows what percentage of job orders your team closes

Historical Metrics // 6

1. Time to Fill

The Metric: The number of days between when a job was opened and when the offer was accepted by a candidate.

What It Tells You: Whether the time it takes your team to fill a job order has been rising or falling over time. Analyzing your Time to Fill also helps you pinpoint potential bottle-necks in your recruiting process and identify which stages you need to accelerate.

The Takeaway: Measuring the average length of each of the steps in your recruitment process allows you to better focus your reps’ time, energy and resources. Perhaps even more importantly, it helps you understand your process on a more granular level so you can identify and isolate the areas that most need improvement.

Historical Metrics // 7

2. Activity Ratios

The Metric: The ratios between any two connected activities in your recruitment process, such as “Interview : Placement.”

What it Tells You: Whether the activities your reps are performing are efficiently leading to the results you want. If your reps are performing the right activities (and enough of them) but they are still not getting downstream results (like interviews and placements), something is wrong.

The Takeaway: The activities your reps perform should lead directly to the results your team is measured by. This means you need to regularly follow these activities down-stream to make sure this is the case. If placements are declining, trace your process back to the beginning to make sure your reps are performing the right activities to gen-erate the results you need.

Historical Metrics // 8

3. Won/Loss

The Metric: The percentage of openings your team has won historically.

What It Tells You: If your team is capitalizing on the opportunities in their pipelines. A declining win rate is typically a cause for concern and can signal a snag in your process.

The Takeaway: If your historical win rate is on the decline, you need to figure out why. Has something changed in your process? Did you hire new reps recently? Did you launch a new business line? Regularly tracking your team’s win rate helps you spot red flags, but it is up to you to figure out the source of the decline and figure out what you need to get it rising again.

Real-Time Metrics // 9

Chapter // 2

Real-Time Metrics

Real-Time Metrics // 10

Summary

What’s happening in your business right now? Real-time visibility into your firm’s pro-cess is essential for properly managing your team and correcting problems before they get out of hand. Where historical metrics allow you to identify overarching trends and long-term performance fluctuations, real-time metrics are essential for closely monitor-ing your team’s results and the leading indicators that affect future performance. Why is this important? Because it gives you the data you need to make the right day-to-day decisions to keep moving in the right direction.

In this chapter, we will explore the 3 real-time metrics that show what’s happening rightnow, including:

• Activity metrics that highlight exactly what your team’s working on in real time• Open Job Orders to understand how job placements are changing over time• Bookings totals that show how your team is doing compared to your average revenue

Real-Time Metrics // 11

1. Activities

The Metric: The number of activities each of your reps performed during a given time period.

What it Tells You: Who’s on top of the leaderboard and who’s on pace to hit their goals. Conversely, which reps are struggling and could benefit from targeted coaching.

The Takeaway: No manager is able to look over their reps’ shoulders all day, so it is important to have another way of knowing whether they are working hard and smart. A real-time activity dashboard gives you instant and clear insight into exactly what your reps are doing on a daily basis. This allows you, as a manager, to stay on top of your reps’ performance. However, it’s not just for you: You should display these activity totals to your reps. It will encourage healthy competition and help your underperforming reps understand exactly what they must do to raise their game.

Real-Time Metrics // 12

2. Open Job Orders

The Metric: Your team’s open job orders arranged by close date and value.

What it Tells You: Exactly what’s in your pipeline, and more importantly, which of these open opportunities are in danger of falling through the cracks. Are there open opportuni-ties that you should help out on while you still have a chance to affect the results?

The Takeaway: Understanding the open job orders in your pipeline and their respective risks is essential for hitting your goals. Make sure your reps are working on the high-est-priority jobs and that nothing is falling through the cracks. As a manager, you can’t affect the outcome of every open job order, so you need to have a good view of the whole picture to make sure you choose wisely.

Real-Time Metrics // 13

3. Bookings Trajectory

The Metric: How much revenue you have brought in this month or quarter and where you stand against your goals and past performance.

What It Tells You: Whether you are on track to hit your goals or whether you need to adjust your strategy to make up ground. Have your sales been coming in steadily or are they clumpy and unpredictable?

The Takeaway: Don’t just sit there with your fingers crossed hoping you’ll hit your goal this quarter:Knowing exactly where you stand in terms of your bookings goals will help you make the day-to-day decisions you need to in order to make sure you end the quar-ter where you need to be. Knowing early on if you’re behind on your goals will give you enough time to adjust course and make up the difference.

Predictive Metrics // 14

Chapter // 3

Predictive Metrics

Predictive Metrics // 15

Summary

Ultimately, the point of using metrics to run your business is to help you make the right decisions to fuel growth and improve performance. That’s where predictive metrics come in.

Essentially, this group of metrics is your data-backed crystal ball. Which job orders will you win? What will your revenue stream look like a month, a quarter or a year in the fu-ture? Do you have enough job orders in your pipeline to not only hit this quarter’s goals, but next quarter’s as well?

In this chapter, we explain the 3 predictive metrics that will help you better anticipateyour future business needs, including:

• The Sales Forecast that uses your historical close rates to predict your pipeline closings

• Active Placements that shows when your recurring revenue is set to end• Open Job Orders to determine if your team has the right mix of activities

Predictive Metrics // 16

1. Sales Forecast

The Metric: Which of your open opportunities are likely to close this quarter based on historical performance.

What It Tells You: What share of your open job orders are likely to close, and more impor-tantly, how this information affects your strategy for hitting your goals.

The Takeaway: Using historical data to predict how much of your pipeline will close each month creates a more accurate snapshot of future revenue and a more efficient, mar-gin-driven sales activity, which allows you to make smarter decisions and correct prob-lems before they get out of hand.

Predictive Metrics // 17

2. Active Placements

The Metric: The ebbs and flows of your profit margin based on your active contracts as well as those that are scheduled to start or end in the given period.

What It Tells You: How much cash you have coming in each week from contract place-ments, and how this total is rising and falling over time.

The Takeaway: Keeping a close eye on your margins and active placements allows you to take the necessary measures in time to compensate for the inevitable placement end date, which will reduce your cash flow. Tracking your active contract placements can give you insights into when important end dates are on the horizon, so that you can start your renewal process on time.

Predictive Metrics // 18

3. Open Job Orders by Employee

The Metric: Each rep’s pipeline of open jobs broken down by stage.

What It Tells You: How much value is in each rep’s pipeline and whether this is enough for them to hit their goals. Who has the most value in their pipeline. If you have the right mix of early- and late-stage opportunities to hit short- and long-term goals.

The Takeaway: Hitting your goals for the current quarter is your priority, but you also want to make sure you’re not jeopardizing future quarters as a result. You should always be looking at your reps’ individual pipelines by stage to ensure that you have enough early-stage job orders to help you hit your goals for future quarters. If the mix is off, work with your reps to smooth it out and create a plan for hitting future goals.

Conclusion // 19

ConclusionAs the staffing industry focuses more and more on data analysis, business has become a numbers game, from carefully tracking successes and failures to improving process operations. With that in mind, it is critical to understand what staffing metrics to mea-sure and the story they tell. As we’ve explained, it’s important to analyze metrics across a time continuum in three time periods: historical, real-time and predictive, so you can get the most out of the numbers and use them to grow your business.

In this eBook, we helped take the guesswork out of figuring out what staffing metrics are the most important to track. We detailed how:

1. Analyzing historical metrics unlocks your data to provide insights into your business

2. Real-time metrics provide the most current data to help you make important decisions

3. Using predictive metrics help better anticipate needs and create economic value from your data

We are confident that tracking a combination of historical, real-time and predictive an-alytics will help you become a metric guru and will put you and your team at the top of your staffing game!

About InsightSquared

InsightSquared is the #1 Analytics product for Staffing & Recruiting firms. Unlike legacy Business Intelligence platforms, InsightSquared can be deployed affordably in less than a day and comes preloaded with reports that real business people can use. Hundreds of companies and thousands of users around the world use InsightSquared’s award-winning analytics to maximize sales performance, increase team productivity and close more business.

#1 for Staffing Analytics

To download a free copy of any of InsightSquared’s ebooks, visit http::www.insightsquared.com/resources/e-books.