Scott Rea
You know the old saying: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure?”
As a Safety Director tasked with overseeing recruiting, compliance, and safety efforts in your company, you must use metrics to avoid wasting time and money, keep auditors and plaintiff’s attorneys out of your hair, and make sure all your drivers make it home to their families for dinner.
With so much data at your fingertips, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to metrics. To keep it simple, we recommend Safety Directors focus on The Core 4.
The Core 4 Metrics for Safety Directors
1: Cost Per Hire
What is it? A hire is someone who made it through the application process, showed up for their first day of work or training, and is actively on payroll. Cost per hire is the amount of money it costs your business to hire one new employee.
The simple way to calculate cost per hire is: Ad Spend / Hires = Advertising Cost Per Hire.
An even more accurate metric is All-In Cost Per Hire, which takes into account the cost of:
All salaries involved in recruiting, screening, and onboarding
MVRs, PSPs, background checks, drug screens, and any other screening tools you use
Advertising
It looks like this: Salaries + Screening Costs + Ad Spend = All-In Cost Per Hire.
Why is it important? This is the ultimate recruiting metric because it tells you how effective and efficient you are at bringing new drivers into your company. It’s a pretty simple concept: Spend the least amount possible to hit your hiring goals. Tracking cost per hire helps you measure your recruitment effectiveness and determine where to spend your dollars.
How do you track it? Advertising Cost Per Hire: Enter your ad spend by source in A-Suite each month, and it will calculate Cost Per Hire for you. It’s so important that A-Suite will email it to you each month.
How can you improve it? The first step is proper messaging. The second step is being efficient with your leads, auto-rejecting unqualified candidates, and speeding up the hiring process — see days to hire, below.
What’s the benchmark? A finger-to-the-wind benchmark for advertising cost per hire is $750, but your mileage may vary depending on the competitiveness of your market. The goal is always to drive it as low as possible. That’s why it’s so important to begin measuring it for yourself.
2: Lead-to-Hire Conversion Rate
What is it? At AvatarFleet, we consider a lead to be a candidate who submitted an initial interest form on your candidate landing page or from an external source like Indeed or Facebook. The lead-to-hire conversion rate is: Number of Hires / Number of Leads, expressed as a percentage.
Why is it important? Drivers are a revenue center for your company. The more folks you have to choose from, the better chances you have of hitting your targets. A healthy lead flow means you’re able to stay staffed up. A good lead-to-hire conversion rate means you’re attracting the right candidates and onboarding them effectively.
How can you improve it? While lead volume is important, we’re all about quality over quantity because your time is money. That’s where the conversion rate comes into play.
What’s the benchmark? Benchmark figures vary depending on your niche, location, and other factors. In terms of lead volume, around 20 leads per seat is a good rule of thumb. A baseline for the lead-to-hire conversion rate is roughly 5%. Compare your lead-to-hire percentage by source so you can monitor which advertising channels perform well for you and allocate your budget accordingly. While important, this metric is secondary to Cost Per Hire.
3: Days to Hire
What is it? Days to hire is the number of days it takes your company to hire someone after they’ve applied for the position.
Why is it important? Days to hire is important to track because speed is a major predictor of your recruiting success. A lengthy hiring process has several downsides. Drivers are judging you during the recruiting process; a long and archaic process represents what their experience will be when they join you. A slow and clunky process increases the number of candidates that ghost you. Then there are the hard costs of taking more than 30 days. You will have to run additional background checks and Motor Vehicle Records requests, and you’ll have one more month of employment verification.
How can you improve it? See where the log jam is in the hiring process, figure out what is slowing down that section of the hiring process and address the cause.
What’s the benchmark? Less than two weeks to go from lead to behind-the-wheel. Your goal should be to hire drivers as quickly as possible. There’s no reason days to hire can’t be 14 days or fewer. While candidates’ schedules don’t always align with road test schedules, if you’re measuring this in months, you’re doing something wrong.
4: Drivers in Compliance
What is it? Drivers in compliance look at whether drivers who have compliance rules assigned to them have any violations.
Why is it important? You just have to be 100% compliant. Period. As a Safety Director, you should think about how this will look if you have to go to deposition. Do you really want to stare down an attorney named “The Hammer” and tell him that you’re a safe operator even though you don’t follow federal regulations or your own safety policy?
How can you improve it? Compliance is a perfect task to automate because it’s repetitive and well-defined.
What’s the benchmark? When it comes to compliance, you must be at 100%.
Metrics Recap
We know you didn’t get into the transportation industry to crunch numbers. But as we said at the start of this article, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Staying focused on The Core 4 will simplify your job because you’ll know what to put on the top of your to-do list. Everyone needs a number!
