One of the advantages of high-volume hiring metrics is that the sheer numbers, while daunting, give you more reliable, actionable data. Much like a scientific study that includes 10,000 patients instead of 100, the data you collect is greater by order of magnitude and the averages you get will be more reliable. When you track the right metrics to improve efficiency in the overall hiring process, you will also see a return on investment.

Let’s take a look at 4 high volume hiring metrics you should look at closely.

1. Time To Fill

Time to fill measures the average days a vacancy sits open and the work of that position goes undone. This number tells you how efficiently your hiring process moves—and when you are undertaking high volume hiring, efficiency is key.

Add one day to the time it takes you to fill a vacancy. It just seems like one single extra day where the job doesn’t get done. But multiply that single day times 1,000 vacancies and you’ve lost 8,000 hours of productive work. For large organizations, particularly those engaged in high-volume hiring, time to fill is important to track in order to better understand how efficiently your hiring process works—from the averages year to year, to the variance in by position type (as some types of jobs fill more quickly than others).

The average time to fill, according to the Society of Human Resource Management, is 42 days, but this high volume hiring metric is less important than understanding how your own internal metrics measure up year to year. Knowing this stat will help you better understand where you can make improvements in your hiring process.

2. Cost Per Quality Applicant

A quality applicant has a resume that meets the job qualifications—i.e., a candidate that has the potential to be a good fit for a vacancy. Because many applicants for a job will simply not have the appropriate qualifications, it is important to consider the overall cost of a job campaign weighed against the number of quality candidates who apply (rather than the total number of applicants). This high volume hiring metric will depend on your job ad posting strategy, whether you use a more sophisticated programmatic job ad platform that targets quality candidates or you post on a job site with a cost-per-applicant payment model. Either way, observing the data helps you understand the cost to produce a quality applicant, which is especially important for high-volume hiring because it allows you to strategize across multiple job ad campaigns and estimate the budget required to actually fill a position with a quality candidate.

3. Source Of Hire

When you can determine which channels or vendors lead to your best applicants, you can reproduce success and mine that well during times of high-volume hiring. Your source of hire will be the location of the job ad that attracts the candidate you ultimately choose to hire. While the source may be different depending on the type of position, understanding your best sources of hire from past job campaigns can help your talent acquisition team strategize future job ad campaigns. When you need to fill a lot of vacancies, being able to have a go-to source for each job type can be the key to streamlining the hiring process from the very start.

4. Offer Acceptance Rate

This metric measures the ratio between offers accepted vs. offers extended—a downturn in offer acceptance rate can signal issues with your hiring process. Under normal hiring circumstances, talent acquisition teams can diagnose why a certain candidate chose not to ultimately accept a position. During high-volume hiring, keeping track of this ratio can help you better understand the bigger picture rather than just doing a case-by-case diagnosis. Whether it’s the need to create a greater candidate engagement strategy or the need to speed up the hiring process so quality candidates don’t get poached, this is a crucial metric. You don’t want to waste the investment in candidates only to lose them at the very end of the process.