Talent Insider

Monday, February 1, 2021

Orion Talent Turns 30!

Orion Talent celebrates 30 years of military hiring and talent recruitment solutions

In 1991, gas cost $1.12/gallon and people were flocking to the movies to see Terminator 2: Judgment Day. At the same time, 29 companies took a chance on a new military recruiting firm called Orion International to hire 95 transitioning Officers. Thirty years later, the principles and foundations upon which Orion Talent was built have helped find careers for more than 50,000 veterans with 8,000+ companies.

Founded on January 7, 1991, by five former Junior Military Officers, Orion Talent is proud to be celebrating our 30th anniversary. Orion’s original mission was to bring the energy, skills, and commitment abundant in military candidates to the greater marketplace. This mission has evolved to reflect Orion’s broadened commitment to providing clients with recruitment process outsourcing, military hiring, search, talent attraction & sourcing, and total talent solutions.

Our history reflects innovation, as we became the first military recruiting firm to find careers for Enlisted Technicians and Non-Commissioned Officers in 1994. By 2007, Orion was the nation’s largest military recruitment firm. And three years later, Orion again expanded our offerings by becoming the first Military Talent Firm to work with non-technical Combat Arms service members. This commitment to veterans in the civilian workplace was most recently recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor which awarded Orion Talent a Gold Medallion for both the 2019 and 2020 HIRE Vets Program.

In January 2016, Orion acquired award-winning RPO firm Novotus and added recruitment optimization and outsourcing capabilities to its skilled talent acquisition service offerings. The acquisition of Accolo followed in 2019 and further strengthened Orion's position in the RPO field. Since then, Orion Talent has been recognized for award winning RPO solutions by Everest Group, HRO Today Baker’s Dozen, and ClearlyRated.

In 2017, Orion International became Orion Talent to better reflect our customer-centric approach to total talent solutions. Most recently, in October 2020, Orion Talent acquired Hirepurpose, a leading provider of diversity job posting distribution to the military and female candidates. We expect to further expand how we serve our candidates and clients through this partnership.

As Orion continues to evolve, we are setting our eyes on an updated set of values - Warrior Ethos, Teamwork, Passion for People, Solution Focused, Excellence, and Customer Wow. In particular, we strive to exemplify Warrior Ethos by leveraging our 30 years of experience to overcoming our clients’ talent acquisition obstacles. By doing so, we will continue to meet and exceed compliance, maintain accountability, and drive business impact.

Gas may cost a dollar more and trips to see movies like T2 may be a thing of the past, but one thing that remains the same at Orion Talent is our focus on Clients, Candidates, and the Team. Thank you for being part of the Orion story as we continue to help people discover meaningful careers and businesses grow by delivering the best talent around the world. Here’s to the next 30 years!

10 Recruiting Metrics You Should Know About

What are Recruiting Metrics?

Recruiting Metrics are an important measure of how successful your recruiting initiatives are. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Data like Time to Fill, Interview to Hire Ratio, Cost to Fill, and Source of hire, among others, can also illustrate the true value of these initiatives when it comes budget time. This data driven approach to recruiting is a smart way to ensure you are hiring the right people. Below, we will examine ten different recruiting metrics or KPIs that you should definitely be tracking.

Time to Fill Metrics & Other Recruiter Productivity Metrics

Below you will find explanations of not only Time to Fill metrics, but Time to hire Source of hire, First-year attrition, Quality of Hire, Interview to Hire Ratio, Offer Acceptance Rate, Candidate Net Promoter Score, Cost to Fill, and Time to productivity.

Time to Fill

High time-to-fill could be negatively affecting your company. This metric is the average number of days between the date a job opens to when an offer is accepted. The longer the time to fill, the more frustrated hiring managers get, the more overworked the remaining employees are, and the higher your recruiting costs go. An average time-to-fill of 36 days according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

To calculate Time to Fill, add up all the time to fill data you have for each position you hired for in a given time period and then divide by the number of roles. Do keep in mind that you should not include metrics for positions that are perpetually open.

Through proper alignment, sourcing, workload balance, and a streamlined process, you can greatly reduce this metric. In fact, companies working with Orion Talent experience a 30% reduction in Time to Fill. Check out the infographic here to learn more about the negative effects of high time to fill, and the improvement possible through Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solutions with Orion Talent.

Time to Hire

Different than Time to Fill, time to hire is an efficiency metric that tracks the average amount of days between when you engage a candidate to then they accept a job offer. Time to fill, on the other hand, measures the time from the job opening to an offer acceptance. Time to hire helps to measure recruiting efficiency and candidate experience and to identify bottlenecks in the process.

Source of Hire

Source of Hire, or SOH, is another important measure of recruiting capabilities. Tracking SOH will give you the percentage of hires that came from each of the recruiting sources you utilize. These could include resources like referrals, job boards, job fairs, etc. Measuring this will help a company determine where to allocate their recruiting budget. Doing so improves candidate quality and enables you to discontinue channels that aren’t producing.

SOH can be tracked through your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), surveys, or even web analytics. Most importantly, a best practice is to ask new hires for their SOH during the onboarding process. You are likely to get a more accurate answer. A good question to ask is how they first became aware of the job opening, as they may have heard about it multiple ways.

First-year Attrition

First-year attrition is the percentage of employees with a tenure of less than one year that leave as compared to everyone that was hired at the same time. There are two types of first-year attrition, managed or employee-initiated and unmanaged or initiated by the employee.

A poor First-Year Attrition metric could be reflective of less than optimal hiring and onboarding process, bad management, or even ineffective employee screening. When analyzing this metric, you should consider how you can improve all of these potential causes. High First-year attrition has wide-reaching impacts, such as decreased employee satisfaction, increased employee workload, increased budgets for items like Cost to Fill, and a lack of employees who are up-to-speed in the performance of their duties.

Quality of Hire

Quality of Hire, while often considered the most valuable metric in a recruiting teams arsenal, is often the hardest to measure. This is because quality is subjective and you often need months to years to truly be able to quantify the quality of a new hire.

Knowing this, recruiters often used already quantified talent metrics like retention, hiring manager satisfaction, and first-year attrition to determine quality of hire as indicators. The formula would then look like this:

QOH = Indicator 1 + Indicator 2/N (where N is the number of indicators you use)

A higher QOH means increased revenues, decreased recruiting costs, and increased productivity. If the measured quality of a hire exceeds the cost to recruit them, then you are on the right track.

Interview to Hire Ratio

Interview to Hire is a process metric and is calculated as the number of interviews you conduct before a hire is made. Analyze this metric to find where you can make improvements, break it down by stage, role, or even hiring manager. Understanding your Source of Hire can improve your Interview to Hire ratio by ensuring your candidates came from sources that are a good match for your positions and therefore are more likely to accept your position.

Offer Acceptance Rate

Offer acceptance rate (OAR) is an essential metric that is the percentage of candidates who accepted a job offer (including verbal offers) and is a reflection of the overall success of your recruiting process.

OAR=# of Offers Accepted/Number of offers

The reasons candidates accept or reject a job offer range from candidate experience, time to hire, the interviewer, hiring package, the office itself, employer branding, and even other employees they interacted with during the interview process.

An average OAR over 90% usually means that a company’s requirements and candidates’ expectations are a match. If it is below this, you should revisit the factors above that affect offer acceptance.

Candidate Net Promoter Score

Candidate Net Promoter Score, known as CNPS is another important measure that reveals how candidates feel about your recruitment process (which encompasses your brand and company). The purpose of collecting this metric is to improve your employer branding and improve recruitment.

CNPS ranges from -100 to +100 and can be found using a candidates’ response on a 0–10 scale to the question “How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?”.

0–6 are called Detractors
7–8 are called Passives
9–10 are called Promoters

You then subtract Detractors from Promoters, which gives you your CNPS.

Cost to Fill

Cost to fill is also known as Cost per Hire. There are a number of costs that go into recruiting and hiring a new employee, including both external and internal costs. Taking all of these costs into consideration, for the number of new hires during a specific time period, is Cost to Fill.

Cost per Hire ($) = (Total External Costs + Total Internal Costs) / Total Number of Hires

Internal costs include salary, benefits, bonuses, career development, employee referrals, government compliance, as well as software and hardware costs.

External costs include third-party fees such as contract recruiters and staffing agencies, job posting fees, job boards, pay for performance job advertising, Career fairs and college campus, background checks and drug tests, recruiting and social media resources.

We have done a lot of the analysis for Cost to Fill for you in our cost-per-hire spreadsheet. We can help you calculate your costs and get a clearer picture of where your money is going when you hire an employee. You can download it here.

Time to Productivity

This metric relates directly to FIrst-year attrition. If employees are leaving within their first year, they have not truly become proficient at their job and you will always be operating at a deficit as far as productivity.

Like Quality of Hire, this metric is subjective and often relies on other indicators. Then you can calculate how long it takes an employee to achieve those indicators.

You should strive for a low Time to Productivity, which reflects a solid recruiting, onboarding, and training process.

Mind your Recruiter Productivity Metrics

As you can see, recruiting metrics like those above are integral to the hiring process. No one wants to waste time, resources, and money hiring employees who will leave in less than a year, having absorbed valuable time and training. Finding and retaining the right candidate can be made easier if you track and act on these ten metrics.

How and Why do Companies Outsource Recruitment

Outsource vs. In-House Hiring - Which is right for you?

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), also known as Outsourced Recruiting, is when an outside firm is used to manage your recruiting function, from the people and process to the technology platform and strategy. The goal is to boost your hiring performance. It is an overall business strategy that should positively impact productivity and profitability. Depending on their level of engagement, your outsourced recruiting team could write job descriptions, check references, help with employee branding, and screen candidates, as well as much more.

In-house hiring, on the other hand, may often be inconsistent, costly, and unpredictable. By outsourcing the whole recruiting process to an expert, you are able to free up your Hiring Managers’ and Human Resources team’s valuable time, giving them time to focus on your current employees, which also gives you the ability to predict what the recruiting process will look like in the long-term.

This predictability can also be seen in recruiting expenses through recruitment process outsourcing as opposed to in-house recruiting. In RPO, all your many hiring costs are rolled into a single cost, so you know what expenses are coming down the pipeline every month. In-house recruiting often comes with high additional costs, like job board posting, background check, and even time spent checking references.

An Outsourced Recruiting expert views their relationship with a company as a long-term, strategic partnership. This relationship has built-in accountability that ensures a consistent talent pipeline. Orion’s Recruitment Process Outsourcing team will become an extension of your team and will effectively and efficiently manage each element of a talent acquisition strategy, from requisition to onboarding.

Benefits of Outsource Recruitment

There are many benefits of Outsourced Recruiting. By taking care of every aspect of recruiting, company leaders are able to focus on their core business functions, while trusting experts to improve recruiting effectiveness, cut costs, reduce turnover, enable growth. All of these benefits add up to an impressive competitive advantage.

Focus on Core Business

When employees and leaders are focused on reducing costs as well as uncovering top talent, their many other responsibilities can suffer. Recruitment Process Outsourcing frees up your internal team to accomplish those other tasks instead of using their valuable time for a non-structured recruiting process.

Outsourced Recruiting is the answer to having too much to manage and not enough hours in the day to focus on the sourcing and recruiting process. And it helps your employees who may lack the time and bandwidth necessary to find the most qualified candidates to focus on core business functions.

Improve Recruiting Effectiveness

An inefficient recruiting process costs more than money. You lose time and people to a process that is decentralized and unorganized. One important metric when it comes to recruiting effectiveness is Time-to-Fill. Time-to-fill is the number of days it takes to fill an open position, from the opening of the position to an offer being accepted by a candidate. Hiring Managers experience frustration and employees experience an increased workload and lower productivity when time-to-fill is too long.

Check out this infographic, Improve Time to Fill with RPO, for an in-depth look at how choosing to outsource recruiting can shorten this metric by 30%. Recruitment Process Outsourcing does this by streamlining the process, effectively sourcing candidates, aligning the team, and balancing the workload.

Need to Cut Costs

Another reason a company may use outsource recruitment is to cut costs. Recruitment costs include candidate sourcing, recruitment technology, assessments, referral programs, to name a few. As these costs climb, other areas of your company can suffer. Your priority may shift from hiring quality candidates to lowering recruiting costs.

Through recruitment process outsourcing by Orion Talent, a business can lower recruiting costs by an average of 35%. This is done by utilizing a proper candidate sourcing strategy, building an employer brand, and developing a pipeline of candidates. Check out this Reduce Recruiting Costs with RPO Infographic to learn more about how outsourcing your staffing can reduce recruiting costs.

Turnover Rate is Too High

Employee turnover is a huge cost for any company. It is estimated that it costs between 100% and 300% of the salary of the person you are replacing to find a new employee. That can be considerable. Not only does high turnover cost a lot, but it affects employee morale and can damage your employer brand.

Increased employee retention is an important benefit of recruitment process outsourcing. As you can see in this infographic, Reduce Your Turnover With RPO, companies that outsource recruitment see a 20% increase in retention. Recruitment Process solutions get to the root of the problem causing turnover and fix more than the symptoms. By doing so, turnover decreases and retention increases.

Rapid Growth

Outsourced recruiting is incredibly scalable. So, when a company needs to hire 500+ employees in a short amount of time, recruitment outsourcing is the answer. Recruitment Process Outsourcing can meet high-volume, surge, and project hiring needs on-time and on-budget. An RPO team can scale up when needed and also scale down when your needs change, which is great for the bottom line.

It Allows a Company to Better Compete

As we have seen, organizations that don’t utilize outsourced recruiting often have a broken process. Recruitment Process Outsourcing gives companies a competitive advantage. While other businesses are struggling with mounting costs, high turnover, and poor hiring manager satisfaction, a company using RPO has control of their resources, process, technology, and people, while also being able to predict future recruiting costs and timelines. By establishing an attractive Employer Brand, developing a strong pipeline, and developing key talent metrics, people can focus on other parts of their business allowing them to compete on a higher level.

People also ask:

What is staffing and outsourcing?

In Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), a company outsources an entire sourcing, recruiting, and hiring need or process to the experts at recruitment process outsourcing companies like Orion Talent. From the first requisition to the final hire, every placement is on the firm providing the service.

Staffing firms, on the other hand, are often a contingent service provider that focuses more on finding an appropriate candidate for an opening. While RPO providers can holistically address recruiting obstacles and fix them while acting as an extension of your team, staffing agencies often do not go beyond finding the right candidate and can leave deeper issues outstanding. Staffing firms are also usually limited to the recruitment part of the process, while negotiations and onboarding are often the clients’ responsibilities.

Ultimately, recruitment process outsourcing teams can brand themselves as your internal recruiters, which helps provide a seamless candidate experience, as opposed to a candidate being handed off once an interview is scheduled. Often a candidate will not even know that an RPO has been engaged.

How much does it cost to outsource recruitment?

Recruitment Process Outsourcing firms generally charge a monthly management fee, which includes management of the entire hiring process, including some transactional fees. This fee typically ends up costing 60% to 75% less than the cost of engaging a traditional staffing firm.

Is Outsourced Recruitment Right for You?

Outsourced Recruitment is right for most companies. Any business looking to design a measurable, effective, and productive hiring process that frees up their team to focus on their core business should take a look at Recruitment Process Outsourcing.

A global leader in temporary power discovered that Recruitment Process Outsourcing was right for their company. Struggling with the need to expand while juggling a high workload, the small recruiting team found that some requisitions went 90 days before being filled.

After turning to Orion Talent, the company was able to develop an efficient recruitment program that allowed for large-scale hiring for a variety of positions. Their time-to-fill was cut to less than 50 days; their interview-to-hire ratio rose to less than 3 to 1, and their candidate experience improved drastically. Download this case study to read more about the challenges and recruitment processing solutions this company experienced.

Still not sure Recruitment Process is Right for Your Company?

Take this multiple-choice quiz about your hiring goals, plans for achieving them, and what candidate sources and metrics are the most important for your organization. In 2-3 minutes, you can determine if RPO makes sense for your organization as a strategic business move. You can also check out this infographic, Is RPO Right for You?, to take a look at all of the benefits of Outsourced Recruiting in one place.

Convinced?

Learn more about Orion Talent’s Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solutions.

Contract Recruiting Solutions from Orion Talent

Orion Talent, a provider of best-in-class military hiring and talent solutions, is excited to highlight an effective option that is part of our Total Talent Solutions -- Contract Recruiting. Contract Recruiting through Orion Talent enables you to leverage the expertise of highly experienced recruiters on a contract basis.

As we all know, COVID-19 has presented companies with unique recruiting challenges. And, for a Fortune 500 company and leading provider of facility solutions, Contract Recruiting from Orion Talent was the answer.

Our client needed to hire thousands of people to keep up with the demand of the reopening of the commercial office space market and looked to Orion Talent to hire the recruitment team responsible for staffing the 10,000 new employees needed. We successfully helped them staff in locations across the US by providing an additional scalable labor recruiting force at a much lower cost. To learn more about how we did this, download the full case study here. You can also learn about how Orion Talent helped another company overcome unorganized operations, attrition, and turnover here.

 

 

“It’s my great pleasure to recommend Orion Talent’s Contract Recruiting services. As a leader within our Talent Acquisition organization, I have relied on the Orion Talent team to provide us with key talent quickly in a variety of markets and functional areas. Orion Talent is a great partner and they have truly supported our growth and success during these extraordinary and unprecedented times.” - Sr. Director, Talent Acquisition, Fortune 500 company

 

Companies battling a decentralized hiring process, a lack of ATS, and surge hiring, may experience unorganized operations and increased attrition. Contract Recruiting through Orion Talent can create a repeatable recruiting process with a pipeline of quality candidates. This will help position recruiting as a core business function and drive success. Contact us today to get started leveraging Contract Recruiting from Orion Talent today.

On-Demand Virtual Hiring Events Through Orion Talent

 
In addition to our scheduled industry- and region-specific virtual hiring events, we are excited to offer our clients the ability to customize an On-Demand Virtual Hiring Event. These events are catered to your scheduling, recruiting, and compliance needs, enabling you to overcome travel and social distancing restrictions, all while meeting your ongoing recruiting needs.
 
Orion Talent On-Demand Virtual Hiring Events serve nearly all industries and include benefits like:
 
 
With an Orion Talent On-Demand Virtual Hiring Event you can recruit skilled specialists and professionals for a wide range of permanent and contingent roles. All we need to know to get started is:
 
- What positions would you like to fill?
- How many candidates would you like to hire?
- When would you like to virtually interview Orion's candidates?
 
We take it from there and set you up with military talent ready to start a new career with your company. Before you know it, you have recruited top leaders and technicians, without having to leave your office, just like the environmental engineering firm below.
 
 
Whether you are looking to ramp up hiring for project based needs, are seeking a company-wide coordinated Military Talent Strategy, or need to fill just a few positions, Orion virtual interviews make it faster and easier to interview the right Military Talent. Contact us today, and put the industry's most committed, outcome-driven recruitment force to work for you today!

Join our LinkedIn Group - Talent Insider with Orion Talent

Have you joined our LinkedIn group, Talent Insider with Orion Talent? Talent Insider with Orion Talent is a group for all hiring managers, employers, and talent acquisition professionals interested in learning more about how to hire top talent. We are proud to offer access to employer resources, including thought leadership, hiring event notifications, podcasts, blog posts, news, other insights and advice, and more!

We also encourage you to share your expert insight, as well! Whether it be through RPO, Search, Military, Attraction & Sourcing, or Total Talent Solutions, this group will help you achieve the talent outcomes your business needs.

Join Talent Insider with Orion Talent

According to our Clients

Refer a Military Job Seeker or Client Company to Orion

If you would like the chance to win a $50 gift card, enter into our monthly drawings for Client referrals and Job Seeker referrals. If your referral results in a hire, you will personally receive a $100 gift card as our way of saying thank you. As always, we will maintain your privacy and never share your information nor that of your referral. That's one entry for each referral that you submit - good luck and thank you for the referral!

Patrick Loftus won the Job Seeker Referral monthly drawing
and is the winner of a $50 gift card.