Staffing agencies have a lot of data to maintain, from candidate tracking systems to job ad sites. If you’re like most agencies, the metrics that get the most attention often have to do with cost. But there are a lot of other metrics you might be overlooking in your rush to maximize results. Let’s look at 3 metrics that can be most helpful to your staffing agency if you really want to sell yourself to clients by offering proof of your quality and efficiency.

Time-to-fill

Time is money, of course. You may be tracking cost-per-hire to stay on budget, but an equally important factor is the length of time that a vacancy stays open until the position is filled. If it takes too long, your job ad wastes money or you are filling fewer positions throughout the year—also wasting money.

For your clients, the actual work they need to be completed goes undone the longer it takes to fill a position. Thus, a lengthier time-to-fill process can lead to dissatisfaction with the staffing agency overall. This metric reflects the efficiency with which your staffing agency gets results, and can be a vital indicator of your performance for clients. If you have an average time-to-fill metric, it can help your agency find outliers and understand the reasons why some jobs take longer to fill. Understanding the numbers helps you change course to root out inefficiencies in the process.

Beyond the promise that you work efficiently, tracking an actual number is a simple way for your agency to know how quickly you can deliver results and communicate this in order to manage client expectations. Offering a prediction with metrics is better than a vague promise of quick results. The metric can also further help your agency by managing your budget for things like job ad placement. When you have a good sense of how long it takes to fill a position, you will also have a better sense of how long you will need to place your job ad.

Quality-of-hire

An often overlooked, but important, metric is quality of hire. While quality can seem an elusive measure that is hard to quantify (after all, we often pit qualitative results against quantitative) it is actually an assemblage of other metrics you may already track. If you want to know the value that a hire adds to an organization or the average value of your hires, you first need to establish the KPIs that are most relevant to your organization. Top indicators of “quality” may be metrics like employee engagement, job performance, turnover rates, and hiring satisfaction (i.e., how hiring managers measure satisfaction with new employees). Each of these metrics has its own schema, from performance reviews to employee engagement feedback. But taken together, this data over time can be truly reflective of the value added to any organization by the talent acquisition team.

If your staffing agency can show your quality of hire metrics, you tout a team that finds quality hires who stick with the company. While finding this info can involve a little more legwork and follow-up with clients to establish metrics like satisfaction or retention rates, this particular metric, when broken down, can be informative for future planning and hiring strategy. When you can connect quality of hire with sourcing, for example, your staffing agency can determine your best source of hire and keep going back to that well to foster a high-quality talent pool.

Candidate engagement

It’s the mantra in show business to keep the talent happy, but maybe it should also be the case in talent acquisition. Measuring candidate engagement can be a reality check for staffing firms on how the hiring process works from the perspective of candidates: Are you providing good customer service to candidates and not just to clients?

When you engage candidates in the process, you not only keep more contenders for positions and stay competitive for top talent, you also provide a good experience that will garner repeat applicants or recommendations for new candidates. You may not be able to discern the candidate experience simply from interacting with candidates—feedback surveys are simple to conduct and an easy way to keep a check on how well the process serves your talent pool.

As the first point of contact for any organization, staffing firms can also have an impact on future employee satisfaction. Similar to “quality of hire,” candidate engagement measures can directly reflect on staffing agency performance and help any agency better sell themselves to clients and prospective applicants alike if they garner good feedback from new hires.