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Metrics in Transition

“We need to compare Apples to Apples” 

This argument for not updating metrics after a process change is a logical fallacy that costs companies money every day. 

Changing the way that you deliver a service  frequently means a change in the metrics you use to manage your services- especially if you added an outsourced vendor into the mix. 

Let’s look at a specific example. 

When we work with Human Resource departments on their Talent Acquisition Service, the golden metric is either Time to Offer ( TTO) or Time to Fill ( TTF). 

Time to offer is the time it takes for an offer to get extended to a candidate from the date a requisition was created. When the entire process is owned by a company, this is a good measure of success for the business. 

Many companies are now outsourcing  the up front sourcing and screening of applicants and the new process looks more like this: 

In this case the new process steps are :

A) Creation of the Req and handoff to the outsource provider

B) Outsource provider sources and screens and presents a slate of candidates to the company hiring manager

C) Hiring Manager interviews, and company HR processes proceed to an offer where appropriate.

With our HROS cloud services, we have access to anonomized and normalized data from 100s of  large companies.  When we look at the overall data, the mean TTO is 60 days. 

When we break the process down, the mean for Segment C ( which is completely interlnal to the company) is 34.5 days. This means that more than half of the TTO time is controlled by the company, not the vendor. 

However,  TTO not to exceed XX days is still the success measure that most companies measure their outsourced vendors to ( it should obviously be the Time to Present to Hiring Manager). By keeping TTO as an “Apples to Apples” comparison, not only does the company lose visibility into the true effectiveness of the vendor, but they also lose visibility into the impact that they are having on the process and other internal opportunities to improve. 

While the urge to keep metrics the same to “show our improvement” is high after a process change, it is important to do the right analysis and have the correct new metrics and vendor SLAs built into the change. 

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