Which hiring metrics matter, and how do you attribute a hire to its source?

Which metrics matter

Hiring generates a great deal of data and very little of it answers the questions a talent leader is actually asked. Time to hire and applications per vacancy describe activity. The metrics that matter describe one person’s path: where they came from, whether they started and finished the application, whether anyone looked at it, how long each step took, and what the resulting hire cost. Read together, by source, they tell you where the money and the people are going.

Attribution is what makes that reading possible. It ties a hire recorded in the ATS back to the channel, campaign or search that first brought the person to the role, so that spend can follow results rather than habit.

What goes wrong

Most employers are measuring the wrong end of the process. Job board invoices report clicks and applications started; the ATS reports hires. Between them sits the drop-off that nobody owns: most visitors leave without applying, and the spend that brought them is lost with them. A channel with cheap clicks and few finished applications looks like a bargain on the invoice and a loss in the hiring numbers, and without attribution nobody can prove which.

The second failure is manual. A team that wants the answer builds it by hand every month, exporting from three systems into a spreadsheet, and the hours spent reporting are hours not spent hiring.

What customers found

wagamama reduced its cost per application by 63% and cut its media spend by 27%. Côte’s team got 20+ hours a month back from manual reporting and admin. Both are figures about spending less for the same hiring, which is what attribution is for.

What good looks like

One view of the funnel, from first click to hire, that the whole team reads. Cost per application and per hire by source, by location and by role, without a spreadsheet. Drop-off shown where it happens so the site and the application can be fixed, not just the media plan. Attribution sent back into the ATS so the system of record carries it, and exports to the BI tools finance already trusts.

How inploi approaches it

Analytics and attribution is how inploi explains every applicant and every hire to large frontline employers, on the ATS you already have. Because the careers site, conversational apply and the Candidate Agent all run on inploi, the hiring experience platform sees the candidate from the first click, and the attribution is captured rather than inferred. Studio shows the funnel in real time, segmented by job, location, brand or date range, and data exports to your own BI systems. ATS sync in both directions across 100+ integrations carries the attribution with the application, where technically possible, so the ATS stays the system of record.