What is a recruitment audit?

A recruitment audit is a systematic examination and assessment of your company’s recruitment process, system and tactic. As a popular management tool, it lets you document and analyze your current hiring workflow, measure recruitment performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

Recruitment audits are best performed by a cross-functional team made up of your recruitment operation’s stakeholders, including hiring managers, interviewers and HR specialists. You may also ask for input from outside sources, such as external recruiters and job candidates. At the end of the audit, you get detailed documentation of your current recruitment process and recommendations on improving your hiring performance.

The benefits of recruitment audits

A recruitment audit offers three main benefits for your business:

• Improve the effectiveness of your recruitment process: An recruitment audit can uncover inefficiencies in your recruitment workflow and provide suggestions on ways to rectify the shortcomings. For example, an audit may reveal that your team is spending too much time on the initial screening of job applicants without finding enough high-quality candidates.
• Optimize your investments in various recruitment channels: Your business is likely recruiting through multiple avenues, such as online job boards, online ads, offline ads, career fairs and campus recruiting. By segmenting your recruitment investment along these channels and analyzing their respective returns on investment (ROIs), you can identify the best-performing channels and shift more resources to them.
• Improve candidate experience and attract better talents: By focusing on your candidates’ experiences as they go through your hiring process, a recruitment audit can result in a more pleasant candidate experience for your job applicants. This can, in turn, improve your company’s reputation as a desirable employer and help you attract higher-quality applicants.
• Ensure compliance with legal requirements and company policies: Depending on the location of your company, your recruitment operation may need to comply with specific legal requirements. For example, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forbids discrimination of many forms. In addition, your business may also have internal policies on diversity. A recruitment audit can ensure your hiring system complies with all relevant laws and company policies.

Put together a recruitment audit team

Before starting your recruitment audit, build a core audit team to spearhead the effort. For the best result, this team should be a cross-functional team consisting of all the main stakeholders of your recruitment operation, such as:

• Internal recruiters: As leaders of your recruitment operations, internal recruiters can give you a complete picture of your recruitment process, from job ad creation and initial screening to interviewing and new hire onboarding.
• Hiring managers: They provide business and subject matter insights. To maintain a diverse point of view, get hiring managers from different business units and functions, such as IT and marketing, on your audit team.
• Interviewers: The employees who interview job candidates have detailed knowledge of your current interviewing process and can offer valuable suggestions on how to improve it.
• Compliance specialists or lawyers: These specialists provide expertise on employment laws and your firm’s diversity policies to ensure your recruitment process complies with all applicable laws and company policies.

To complement your core recruitment audit team, you also want input from external stakeholders, such as:

• External recruiters: If your company uses recruiting agencies or headhunters to source job candidates, incorporate their input into your recruitment audit. They can also provide valuable insights into other companies’ recruitment processes and tactics.
• Job candidates who dropped out or declined offers:Ask them for feedback. What contributed to their decisions? What are their candidate experiences, and what could you have done better? They can point you to the shortcomings in your recruitment operation.
• Successful job candidates: Ask about their end-to-end experience going through your recruitment funnels, from first hearing about your job opening to applying and interviewing to accepting an offer. They can also give you feedback on your new hire onboarding process.

Map your internal recruitment process

Follow your internal recruitment process step by step and map out every step in detail. Typical steps include:

• Creating job descriptions
• Posting job ads
• Initial screening of applicants
• Interviewing
• Making offers
• New hire onboarding

For each step, describe the activities and document the systems and procedures used. For example:

• Are you using standardized templates to create job descriptions?
• How do you decide where to post job ads?
• What criteria do you use to perform the initial screening and invite candidates for interviews?
• How are interviews organized? Do you use any interviewing templates, such as structured interviews?
• How do you evaluate interview results? Do you use any standardized scoring forms?
• How do you make hiring decisions based on interview results?
• How do you communicate with candidates throughout the recruitment process?
• What is the onboarding process for new hires?

Measure the time your employees spend on each step and the corresponding wait time for candidates.

This internal audit of the recruitment process gives you a detailed view of your hiring workflow and helps you identify inefficiencies in your recruitment operation. You can then focus your optimization efforts on the problematic areas.

Analyze your recruitment channels

Many businesses utilize multiple channels to reach potential job candidates. For example:

• Online job boards
• Offline ads (e.g., classifieds, magazines, billboards, radio and TV)
• Career fairs
• Campus recruitment events

To optimize your recruitment strategy, segment your recruitment investment by channels and measure each channel’s performance and ROI. You can use performance metrics that include:

• Number of job applicants: This measures the channel’s efficiency in reaching people interested in your job openings.
• Number of positions filled: How many hires are made through this channel?
• Applicant-to-hire ratio: This measures this channel’s effectiveness in attracting high-quality candidates.
• Job offer-to-acceptance ratio: What proportion of job offers are accepted by the candidates recruited through this channel? It tells you if this is an effective channel for finding applicants who are a good match for your company.
• Average time to hire: How long does it take from posting a job ad in this channel to filling your open position? It tells you if this channel is a good choice if you do need to fill an open position fast.

Once you’ve measured each channel’s performance, you can compare that against the cost of that channel and calculate your ROI.

For example, suppose you’ve spent $10,000 on online job boards and $5,000 on career fairs, and you’ve hired 10 people through job boards and two through career fairs. Your ROIs for online job boards and career fairs are $1,000 per hire and $2,500 per hire, respectively. To optimize your recruitment investment, you may want to shift more of your recruitment budget to online job boards and away from career fairs.

Get feedback to understand candidate experience

A recruitment audit should not be limited to your internal hiring process. It’s important to focus your audit on candidate experience as well. Many candidates share their job application experience through word of mouth, online reviews and social media.

A positive candidate experience increases the likelihood of your offers getting accepted, enhances your firm’s reputation in the talent marketplace and attracts more high-quality job applicants. Conversely, a negative candidate experience can tarnish your brand as an employer and make it more difficult for your company to land the talents it needs to succeed.

To gather insights into your candidates’ journeys, ask them for feedback at every step of your recruitment process. If someone drops out of your recruitment funnel or declines an offer, contact them to ask why. Focus on the areas they don’t like about your recruitment process and get their input on how you can improve their candidate experience.

For example, if some job applicants say they dropped out due to a lack of communication, you can improve the candidate experience by sending regular status updates to all applicants.

Monitor your competitors’ recruitment efforts

Once you’ve audited your internal recruitment process and candidate experience, it’s time to look into your competition. Start with identifying your competitors in the talent marketplace, some of which may not necessarily be in your industry.

For example, if you’re in the IT consulting industry, you’re competing for candidates not just with other IT consulting firms but also with the IT departments of unrelated companies.

A competitive recruitment audit can include:

• Check your competitors’ career websites to see how they present themselves as an employer.
• Examine your competitors’ job ads to understand what messages they use to attract job applicants.
• Monitor the internet to find out where your competitors post their job ads.

After you have a good picture of your competitors’ recruiting strategies, you can adjust your own tactic to differentiate yourself in the talent marketplace.

A checklist for your recruitment audit

To make things easier for you, we’ve prepared a recruitment process audit checklist:

• Build a cross-functional recruitment audit team consisting of recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers and compliance specialists
• Map your internal recruitment process, focusing on:
  • A detailed description of each step
  • Any templates used
  • When and how communications are made
  • How decisions are made
• Analyze recruitment channels and measure their effectiveness
• Get input from job applicants to understand the candidate experience
• Monitor your competitors’ career websites and job ad placements