The Metrics That Matter (And The Ones We Need To Let Go)

Every Talent team has dashboards. Every Talent leader reports metrics. But are we measuring what really matters?

In this episode, Edan Haddock explores the difference between operational recruitment metrics and true business intelligence. From Time to Hire and Cost per Hire through to succession risk, role criticality, performance, potential and workforce resilience, this episode challenges the way Talent functions prove their value.

If Talent wants a seat at the executive table, we need to stop reporting activity and start telling stories that help leaders make better business decisions.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Welcome back to Eden Haddock Total Talent. I am your host, Eden Haddock, Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember. No guests, no sponsors, just conversations about the future of talent from somebody who's still doing the job every day. Today's episode comes from something I've noticed over the past decade. Talent teams have become incredibly good at building dashboards. We have more data than ever before, more Power BI, more Tableau, more workday dashboards, more greenhouse reports, more charts, more colors, more percentages. But are we actually measuring talent? Or are we measuring recruitment administration? Because of course, those are two very different things. I think somewhere over the last ten years, we've accidentally become obsessed with reporting things that are easy to count instead of things that actually help the business make better decisions. And today I really want to unpack that. Not just what we should measure, but why. Because metrics without context are just numbers. Data without narrative is noise. And talent teams don't need bigger dashboards. We need better stories. We'll start with a statement. We report to ourselves. Here's an exercise. Imagine you're presenting your monthly talent report. You proudly tell the executive team time to fill is 38 days. Offer acceptance is 96%. Candidate NPS score is at plus seventy-one. Agency spend is down 18%. Hiring manager satisfaction is 4.8 out of five, for example. Now imagine your CEO asks, so what? Silence. Right? Not because they're wrong. But because we've answered a question nobody asked. Executives don't wake up wondering about candidate NPS. They wake up wondering: can we deliver our strategy? Do we have enough capability? What are our biggest risks? Can we hit revenue? Can we launch? Can we innovate? Talent often reports operational metrics, but executives want business intelligence. So we'll talk now about recruitment metrics versus business metrics. This is where I think we need a mindset shift. Recruitment metrics tell us how recruitment performed. But talent metrics tell us how the organization is performing. They are related, but they're not the same. So let's compare. Recruitment asks, how many hires? The business asks, did we hire the people who changed the business? Recruitment asks how fast? Business asks, what happened because we weren't fast enough? Recruitment asks cost per hire. Business asks cost of vacancy. It's a completely different conversation. Now I want to tackle the big one. Time to hire. Every few months, LinkedIn decides time to hire is a terrible metric. I disagree. Sort of. Here's where people get confused. Time to hire is not a measure of recruitment performance or a talent functions performance. Let's stop using it that way. If a recruiter fills a niche AI engineering role in ninety-five days, are they slow? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe there were only six people in Australia. Maybe compensation wasn't competitive. Maybe the approvals took six weeks. Maybe the hiring manager disappeared twice. Maybe the organization changed strategy halfway through. So of course, blaming talent for time to hire is lazy leadership. But throwing the metric away is equally lazy. Because time to hire tells us something incredibly important. Business risk. Imagine your head of cyber leaves. It takes a hundred and forty days to replace them. That's not a recruitment problem. But it's an organizational risk problem. It tells us we didn't have succession. We didn't build capability. We relied on one person. We had no talent pipeline. We had no contingency. That's valuable intelligence. Time to hire didn't fail. We just interpreted it incorrectly. So the metrics I think actually matter. I want to talk about what I think belongs on executive dashboards. Firstly, role criticality. Not every vacancy is equal. Replacing a graduate coordinator isn't the same as replacing your chief revenue officer. So why do we often report them equally? Role criticality changes everything. Time, risk, investment, executive attention. Vacancy risk, I think, is important. How many critical roles are currently vacant? How long have they been vacant? What's the operational impact? Revenue, safety, customer experience, innovation? Right, now we're talking. Then we move on to succession coverage. Is there one successor? Two? None? Are they ready now? Ready in twelve months? Ready in three years? That's talent. Performance distribution as well. Where are our highest performers? Where are they concentrated? Where are they leaving? Where are we over-dependent? And potential. This one fascinates me. Performance tells you what someone has done. Potential tells you what they could become. And great organizations measure both. Because tomorrow's leaders don't magically appear. I like regrettable loss. I like that as a measure. You know, but we need to stop measuring turnover. And we need to start measuring who left. There's a huge difference between losing someone and losing someone you absolutely couldn't afford to lose. Then internal mobility, of course, I think we all report on that. You know, but reframing it, can your people grow? Or do they leave to get promoted? That's a real powerful talent metric. The last one is workforce resilience. It's a big one for me. How exposed are we if someone leaves tomorrow? Now that's a board-level conversation. But we really need to stop reporting numbers and start telling stories. This might be my biggest takeaway today. Dashboards don't change businesses. Stories do. Instead of saying time to fill increased by six days, say our average time to fill increased because our highest risk technology roles doubled in complexity. During that period, three major projects were delayed, costing approximately eight weeks in delivery. We recommend building succession pipelines for these capability areas. So it's the same data, but a completely different impact. Or instead of saying and reporting, we hired 180 people, try those 180 hires enabled us to open two new markets, launch three new products, and reduce contractor reliance by 22%. Now, executives care when it's presented that way because you've translated talent into business language. I genuinely think the future of talent isn't reporting what happened. It's predicting what's about to happen. Imagine walking into the executive meeting and saying, we believe marketing is at high risk succession within the next twelve months. Or we have identified three business critical teams with no ready now successes. Or based on mobility trends, we expect a spike in regrettable turnover within engineering. That's where AI changes everything. That's where people analytics changes everything. So, you know, it's predictive. It's not prettier dashboards. It's not more data, but it's better predictions. Talent shouldn't be the department that explains yesterday. We should be the function helping the business prepare for tomorrow. So here's the challenge I'd leave everyone with this week. Please do open your latest talent dashboard. I have. Look at every metric and ask yourself one question. If I removed this tomorrow, would the business notice? It's a big question. And if the answer is no, then why are we reporting it? Talent has spent years proving we can recruit. But I think the next decade is about proving we can influence business strategy. And that means measuring risk, capability, potential, leadership, criticality, succession, readiness, resilience. Not because dashboards look impressive. Because organizations make better decisions when they understand the story behind the numbers. Metrics are important. But metrics alone don't create confidence. Stories do. And that's our opportunity. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Eden Haddock Total Talent. If you have enjoyed today's conversation, I'd really appreciate it if you could follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And please share the episode with someone who still believes a green dashboard means everything is fine. Or share it with someone that that doesn't. Until next time, keep challenging convention, keep asking better questions. And remember the best talent teams don't just report what happened, they help shape what happens next. Thank you.