You can probably quote your monthly revenue and cash position from memory. How long it took to fill your last five roles is usually harder to pin down. Hiring tends to get reported once a quarter in a spreadsheet that counts applicants and interviews, and that report rarely helps anyone make a decision.
For a growing company, hiring sets the pace for almost everything else in the plan. A product launch slips when the engineering seats stay open. A sales target gets missed when new reps start two months late. Four numbers give a CEO an honest read on whether hiring is keeping up, and all four fit on one page.
1. Time to Fill, Measured Against the Plan
Time to fill is usually measured from the day a job opens to the day an offer is accepted. That measures how long recruiting took, which matters less to a CEO than when the new person actually starts compared to when the business needed them.
A more useful version compares the start date against the date the role was planned. If the operating plan called for a new controller in March and that person started in June, the role ran about 90 days behind. Tracked across every planned hire, this number shows how far hiring is lagging the plan the board approved.
When it starts to grow, look at where the time goes. A requisition that waits three weeks for budget approval counts. So does a hiring manager who takes ten days to give feedback on a candidate. Some of the biggest delays can happen before a recruiter is ever involved.
2. Offer Acceptance Rate
This is the share of offers that candidates accept. It is the closest thing recruiting has to a close rate in sales, and it can surprise a leadership team the first time they see it.
A declined offer is expensive in a way that never shows up on a report. By the time the candidate says no, the team has spent weeks on sourcing and interviews, and the runner-up has often accepted another job. Many searches go straight back to the beginning.
As a rule of thumb, if more than one in five offers gets turned down, look at what happens before the offer goes out. Compensation matters, and it is usually where leaders look first. The reasons candidates give when they decline tend to come back to how the process felt. A six-week process with long gaps between interviews can lose to a competitor who made an offer in eight days, even when your salary is a little higher.
Ask for the reason behind every declined offer. After two or three quarters the pattern is usually obvious.
At a 70% offer acceptance rate, almost one in three of your searches starts over at the finish line.
3. First-Year Retention of New Hires
The first two numbers measure speed. This one measures whether the hiring worked.
Take everyone hired in the last 12 months and count how many are still with the company. Then, at the 90-day mark for each new hire, ask their manager whether they would make the same hire again knowing what they know now. Those two answers together are as close to a quality-of-hire number as most companies need.
Break the results down by department and by hiring manager. A single manager who has lost three of their last five hires will disappear inside a company-wide average, and that manager is often where the fix needs to start.
Early departures usually trace back to one of two places. Either the role was described one way in interviews and turned out to be something else, or the first few months were poorly planned. The breakdown by manager will usually point to which one.
4. The Cost of Your Open Seats
This is the number that gets hiring onto the executive agenda.
Every open role has a cost, and for some roles that cost is easy to estimate. Take a sales team with six open rep positions, where a fully ramped rep brings in $600,000 a year. Each empty seat represents about $50,000 a month in revenue that is not coming in. Across six seats, that is $300,000 a month.
Other roles take more judgment. An open engineering seat might push a release back a quarter. An open customer success role might leave each person on that team carrying 40 more accounts than planned. The estimate can be rough. A monthly dollar figure next to each open role changes how fast approvals get signed and how seriously hiring managers protect time for interviews.
The Numbers You Can Skip
Recruiting teams track plenty of other metrics, and many of them are useful for running recruiting day to day. They do not need a spot in a CEO's monthly review.
- Applicant volume. A role that draws 400 applicants can be harder to fill well than one that draws 40, because someone has to screen all of them.
- Cost per hire on its own. Finance will want it, but a cheap hire who leaves in six months costs far more than the savings.
- Interviews scheduled and candidates submitted, which measure effort.
- Source of hire. Worth reviewing once or twice a year when you set the recruiting budget.
How to Put This in Front of Leadership
Keep it to one page and review it monthly. Show each number next to the same figure from the previous two quarters, because the direction it is moving tells you more than any single month.
Give each number an owner. Time to fill and offer acceptance usually belong to whoever runs recruiting. First-year retention belongs to the managers doing the hiring. The cost of open seats belongs to the executive who owns each budget, since they are the ones who feel it.
If these numbers do not exist today, start by pulling the last six months of offers and start dates. Most of that data already sits in an applicant tracking system or a spreadsheet somewhere. Putting it together once will show where hiring is slowing the company down and whether your current team has the capacity to fix it or needs outside help.