The Basic Tenets of HR Metrics

Any company, regardless of size or tenure, would want to make sure that the employees they hire would be worth the investment. You just may be thinking that the mere process of hiring does not really warrant that much expenses because this is just the first step in the whole employment process. This is a popular misconception that a lot of people have. What most people do not know is that this first step is already an investment on the part of the company.

At first glance, HR personnel would not really know if a particular person they consider hiring would indeed perform well in the company. And this is one of the main goals of the HR department, to hire people who would be efficient in the company. Oftentimes, it is the human element that is questionable in the overall success of a company's operations. Thus, there is a need to establish HR metrics in any existing company today.

All your years working as HR personnel would indeed give you a lot of experience. This experience, in turn, can help you in performing the duties and responsibilities of your job better. However, you have to consider the fact that when you are interviewing an applicant for a certain position, he or she will be at her absolute best. The applicant will be selling his or her skills, as well as work experience.

To do this, the applicant will be presenting his or her own self in the best way possible. And where selling is concerned, only the positive aspects would be shown as much as possible. Thus, there really is no concrete way of knowing for sure whether or not an applicant would be efficient at the job. Not unless you can rely solely on your gut instincts. A certain kind of measurement system should be established, and this is what HR metrics is about.

Developing such a system for HR metrics can be a bit difficult, but only when you do not have complete information about your new hires. Thus, it is important to have this information as complete and thorough as possible. Background checks are effective methods of obtaining the needed information. Be as thorough as possible when conducting these background checks.

Now, there would definitely be times when you would have a quota to hit when hiring new people for your company. But when you are processing background checks, do not consider the questionable ones that you will surely come across. Do not do this, even if it is just for the purpose of hitting your quota. In the long run, this would just be a waste of time. Sure, there might be that off-chance that an employee would be efficient at the job regardless of being a bit questionable. But the chances for this are quite low.

Also, in conducting background checks, you need to limit the information that you would be processing for HR metrics. During the course of such checks, you would inevitably come up with a lot of information about the applicant; some of which might even be useless for your purposes. Thus, you need to weed out such information from your pool of resources. The recommended figure for this is actually ten. With these ten HR metrics, you can then process the information accordingly. Determining the efficiency of your applicants, and even your new hires, would then be made easier.