Importance of Human Resource Metrics

The processes of recruitment and selection are not as easy as they may seem. Any person who works for the human resource department of any company can certainly attest to this. This is because there is no definitive means of distinguishing which of the applicants for a particular position would be efficient on the job from the ones who would not be as efficient. If there were some sort of definitive system of discerning such, maybe companies all over the world would not experience such high turnover rates! This is why human resource departments of companies worldwide recognize the need to come up with human resource metrics, or HR metrics.

The term HR metrics, when you put it as simply as possible, refer to guidelines. These guidelines are measurable and are used by companies to come up with cost-effective strategies that are primarily aimed at the ensuring high-end performance of the workforce. The operative concept in HR metrics is employee assessment. Unless you have years and years of recruitment and selection under your belt, it is actually quite hard to assess the efficiency of an applicant right off the bat. Without the proper training entailed in being a recruitment specialist, it is close to impossible to assess applicants accurately. There are even times when even the most experienced HR specialist would have problems going about with accurate assessment for this!

This is precisely why HR metrics are very much needed by any personnel working for the HR department of a company. With the proper HR metrics system, the HR department of the company can determine which of the applicants would be worth investing on.

Gathering and creating a system of human resource metrics for any company is something that can be done easily; that is, as long as you have the proper guidelines to back you up. The most important thing here is to gather information about the employees. However, not all pieces of information would be used in developing human resource metrics at all. Weeding out the reliable pieces of information from those which are not is the ideal here. But then, at what figure should the gathering of human resource metrics be pegged? The recommended figure by the lot of recruitment specialists and experts here is actually pegged at ten. With this figure, you will actually come up with an effective system of assessing your company's workforce.

Another important thing to remember in the process of developing human resource metrics is that all aspects of the business should be considered. To name a few of these business aspects, these would be recruiting and retention, employee engagement, manager satisfaction, and the productivity of the workforce. There are other aspects and factors to consider, of course. But the underlying concept in ensuring the efficiency of the human resource metrics a company would use is actually very simple: the company should be very goal-oriented. When a company knows what it wants to achieve, then distinguishing the aspects to be retained from the ones to let go would be certainly easier.