Most human resources professionals understand the importance of aligning their initiatives with the overarching vision, mission and goals of the organization, and tracking and reporting HR metrics is a critical piece of the puzzle. By providing quantifiable feedback to their organizations, HR professionals are able to directly report back how their work supports the overall success of the organization. At first glance, determining what metrics to track and how to report findings can be daunting, so consider these sure-fire metrics that will communicate your department’s success and speak to the overall goals of the organization.

Talent Acquisition Metrics - your organization probably cares about attracting top talent. Pay attention to things like:

• Ratio of interviews per offer - this will help you gain insight into the success of your screening process.

• Cost per hire - this critical metric will help you understand if you are yielding a return on your recruiting investment.

• Source of hire - track where your applicants originate from, and how many offers are made to various sources. This will help you dial into particularly successful sources, and save money by cutting out the rest.

Engagement Metrics - now that your organization attracted and hired top talent, it wants to engage and retain that talent. Pay attention to:

• Retention rate of your top performers - make sure you aren’t losing key talent and depleting your bench strength by tracking the retention rates of your high potential performers.

• Voluntary exit rates by manager - monitoring voluntary turnover is critical. Take it one step further by tracking turnover rates by manager. This will give you insight into any potential performance issues within your management team.

• Voluntary exit rates by tenure - pay close attention to when in an employee’s life cycle you see turnover trends. Do you see significant turnover at the 18-month point, or perhaps the 3-year point? This will give you insight into opportunities for engagement techniques at specific life-cycle points.

Workforce Profile/Culture & Diversity Metrics -ensure your organization is set up for sustainable success by taking a critical look at culture and diversity metrics. This will provide you with insight into if your organization is fully utilizing the workforce availability in its region. It will also speak to the experience your employees have when working for your organization.

• Average workforce age - this will help you understand the life cycle stage of your workforce, give you insight into possible communication barriers that may exist cross-generationally, and will help you better understand your bench strength to strategically plan for the future.

• Overall employee satisfaction - gathering information about your overall workforce happiness is critical, whether it is done formally or informally. This type of metric tracking will give you insight into opportunities for improvement within your organizational culture, leadership, and even how your culture translates to employees

• Inclusivity and diversity - it’s important to make sure everyone has a seat at the table, and organizations are more profitable and more efficient with a diverse staff. Make sure everyone has the same spectrum of chances to be seen, heard, and valued. Track diversity and inclusion across leadership, projects, departments, applicant pool, etc., to get a better picture of what you could improve on.

Tracking metrics is critical for every functional group, and human resources is not excluded from this. Take the time to collect data and report regularly to senior leadership. You will be able to better communicate how your initiatives speak to the overall goals of the organization, and as a result your work will gain respect and credibility.

Originally published June 2014, updated for clarity and content June 2023.