These two KPIs give you insights on recruiting, hiring, and your overall GTM team's readiness -- all critical leading indicators for future pipeline generation and revenue achievement.
Last week we covered revenue team headcount and hiring KPIs to track performance against plan. But unfortunately there isn’t a "headcount tree" out there that can be harvested anytime a role needs to be filled. You need a dedicated and formal effort that involves a recruiting team staffed with professionals, a process, and engaged hiring managers. Headcount needs to be hired on-time, in seat, ramped up and ready to contribute so they can support the revenue plan and your bigger company goals.
This overall effort (including both the process and the extended recruiting team) should be efficient and organized. This can be difficult. As companies grow or head into a new fiscal year, the recruiting and staffing demands increase -- not just in GTM but across the company --and a lot of hiring is front-end loaded. It is made even more difficult in a sales organization where capacity to close deals and generate pipeline are critical to success.
As mentioned last week, even though a plan may call for a net increase of say 10 sales reps over the course of the year, the actual number may be 15 due to attrition. The recruiting effort needs to be constructed and managed to support this higher number -- another reason why ensuring attrition assumptions are part of headcount planning is so important.
There are two KPIs that can be used to evaluate and gain insights into recruiting and hiring:
On-Time Hiring
- Key questions answered: Are people starting in a role on-time, early, or late?
- How to measure: On-time Start Date (in days) = Planned On-time Start Date - Actual Start Date
- Noteworthy: For quota-carrying roles, any negative gap in this KPI creates forecast risk and creates a capacity deficit that can be hard to make up.
Hiring Velocity
- Key questions answered: How long does it take to recruit and get new people in seat?
- How to measure: Count of the number of days from when the hiring requisition is opened/published to start date (in-seat).
- Noteworthy: Measure by segment and geography due to material variations. Also breakout by external vs internal hires.
It is important to have new hires start on time per the hiring plan. Even if you end each quarter making the exact number of hires per the plan, if they are all starting 30 days late, you will be behind on building up the people capacity needed to attain your targets. An extended recruiting timeframe or one that is trending in the wrong direction may be the reasons your people are starting late. It also extends the time to backfill lost capacity from attrition, further creating forecast risk and ability to hit your targets. Both of these should be broken out by external vs internal hires, by segment and geography.
Using the above KPIs (along with the base headcount KPIs) helps to build a narrative on why you may be ahead, spot on, or behind on filling roles against the plan and allow for the insights needed to identify the right corrective actions.
Revcast Delivers the KPI View
These hiring KPIs -- along with many other crucial GTM KPIs -- are always available for tracking, alerting, and optimizing within the Revcast solution. Below are two screenshot examples of how you can visualize team hiring status while accounting for attrition and internal promotions, as well as notifications with actual vs. plan comparisons so you can respond more swiftly as things track off plan.
You can get even more great GTM KPI information in our ebook "Revenue Growth: The Metrics You Can't Ignore" -- 60 pages of educational content with data-illustrated examples.
We'd love to show you how you can stay on top of your Hiring KPIs within our solution and increase transparency for your recruiting and enablement stakeholders. You can book a 30-minute time slot here to schedule your Revcast demo.
Next week's KPI focus: We will illustrate the increased risk and impacts of late hiring.
