OKR examples for the modern recruitment business

As a recruitment business, it’s your top priority to ensure that your clients receive the crème de la crème of talent even at all levels of business departments. And when this is poorly done, the recruitment process can cost you massive losses. In fact, with the average cost of recruiting and onboarding an employee pegged at almost £4,000, automating and streamlining this process should be a high-priority issue.

Improvements in the recruitment and onboarding processes can have a significant impact on the success of an organisation. However, sometimes it becomes difficult to determine how to measure success. This is where OKRs, Objectives and Key Results come in to help recruitment teams single out improvement areas to get them closer to achieving better results.

The importance of having OKRs to align teams for better results

OKR, objectives and key results facilitate a collaborative and efficient strategy and goal management framework that acts as a bridge to align and engage employees with top-level business objectives.

OKRs help communicate a clear direction and tighten team focus by:

1. Setting overarching objectives

Challenging objectives bring teams together and motivate them to give their best. This is especially useful for companies in uncertain industries that experience constant change, as teams are inspired to go above and beyond while giving their best to achieve set goals. They also reiterate the importance of coordination in the workplace.

2. Promoting transparency and clarity

Transparency directly affects teams’ alignment and their ability to produce better results. OKRs are visible to all members of an organisation. Employees at all levels can access the company’s objectives and key results, giving them a clear picture of what they are working towards and their role in achieving the set objectives.

3. Tracking

Management by objectives is popular with top-achieving companies. OKRs are established using metrics that leaders and managers within the wider business can easily track. While they may not require daily check-ups, OKR tracking is a great way to ensure regular monitoring, which is essential to avoid slip-ups.

4. Reassessing and stretching

The beauty of OKRs when it comes to aligning teams for success is that they are not written in stone and allow for a certain degree of autonomy as to exactly how they are achieved. Employers should feel free to revise and restructure them at any point, as long as any changes are communicated effectively amongst the team responsible for achieving those OKRs. This makes it easy to eliminate objectives that no longer seem relevant or attainable. You can look at your key results at the end of each OKR cycle and determine if you have achieved them. If not, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and make the necessary adjustments.

OKR examples in a recruitment business

Recruiting and onboarding employees is complex. Recruiters must find a suitable candidate that fits the employer’s profile. For recruitment businesses to excel, it’s highly recommended to incorporate OKRs. Here are examples of the kind of OKRs that a recruitment business may have:

Objective 1: Improve the Marketing Strategy

It’s crucial to optimise your recruitment marketing strategy continuously. A good strategy will directly improve the quality of job applicants you attract and hire.

Key Results

1. Redesign the website to drive a 5% increase in job applications.
2. Work with the marketing team to increase job views by 20% in one quarter.
3. Implement a recruitment software package to automate the existing recruitment process by the end of Q2.
4. Boost recruitment events’ attendance by 30% by the end of the year.
5. Invest £5,000 in recruitment marketing via LinkedIn to achieve a 15% increase in applications.

Objective 2: Lower the Cost Per Hire

Understanding the amount of money you spend on hiring every individual is crucial. This provides an insight into the business’s financial profitability.

Key Results

1. Reduce expenditure per hire by 20% by the end of the year.
2. Increase the employee referral bonus to £1,000.
3. Increase the geographic reach by 300 miles to expand the talent pool.
4. Expand the talent pool by 30% to attract quality talent with limited expenditure.
5. Hire 40% of candidates from free posts.

Objective 3: Decrease Failed Hire Rates

Decreasing failed hires will result in hiring long-term candidates and saving on costs that are caused by high turnover rates.

Key Results

1. Reduce the average hiring time by 20% by creating a free-flowing recruitment process.
2. Boost social networking by 50% to keep new hires engaged with the rest of the workforce.
3. Increase the rate of hiring acceptance by 15%.
4. Increase recruitment budget by £3,000 to encourage successful applicants to accept job offers that suit them.
5. Boost the employee net promoter score to over 50 to ensure that new hires are more likely to refer their friends and colleagues.

Using OKRs for faster results

Hopefully, this short blog article explains the importance and some of the main benefits of OKRs in today’s modern business. The examples used have been created to give you an idea of the kind of OKRs that may be set within a recruitment business to help you identify how you could begin to develop some OKRs of your own to suit your teams.

If you would like further help to get started writing compelling OKRs in your business, download The OKR Builder™ today or get in touch with us at hello@reclaro.com.