One of the key ways to measure the health of your business is through human resources (HR) metrics. HR metrics span everything from hiring to retention, productivity, satisfaction and more. They can (and should) include both qualitative and quantitative data. 

Without the right metrics in place, you won’t have an accurate sense for whether or not your workforce is supporting your greater organizational goals.

There's a seemingly endless set of HR metrics to help you get this data, so we've identified the 14 most important metrics for you to focus on. 

Having access to metrics gives you a glimpse into your people and talent operations. But at the same time, gathering those metrics can be a challenge for a number of reasons: 

There’s a wealth of HR metrics that you can track to gauge how your people and business are performing, but we’ll focus on four key categories: general HR, hiring and recruitment, learning and development and benefits. 

This category of metrics captures the general state of your employees as a whole, and includes everything from engagement to turnover to the value they bring to your business. 

Employee engagement measures how employees feel about their job and workplace and is a key metric that impacts retention and the broader employee experience. To track employee engagement, you need a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, ranging from software to track turnover and absenteeism to surveys and interviews to gauge satisfaction. 

Turnover refers to how often an employee leaves the company. It’s easy to assume that high or low turnover rates reflect company failure or success, but the reality is more complicated. High turnover rates can indicate anything from poor company culture to ineffective onboarding processes, so it’s important to determine the specific cause behind turnover rates. 

Employee lifetime value (ELTV) captures the financial value that an employee brings to their employer throughout their tenure at the organization. The higher the ELTV, the more value and profit the employee brings to the business.

Your employee retention rate captures the percentage of employees that stay with your company over a set time period. To calculate this percentage, you divide the number of employees who remain over that time period by the total number of original employees and multiply by 100.

The benchmark for retention rates varies across industries. 70% or higher is considered good in high turnover industries such as retail or hospitality, whereas 90% or higher is good in industries with lower turnover. 

Retention rates also vary across role and seniority, so the rates should be calculated separately for each category. 

This category of metrics captures the state of your hiring and recruitment processes.

Time to hire measures the time spent onboarding a new employee, starting from the moment the position is advertised to the moment the employee is fully onboarded. This metric can spotlight potential bottlenecks in the hiring process.

To calculate time to hire, simply count the number of days between the day the candidate accepted an offer and the day that they were added to your hiring pipeline.

Cost-per-hire measures the amount it costs to hire a new employee, and includes everything from placing a job ad to sourcing to time invested by recruiters and hiring managers. Like the time-to-hire metric, cost-per-hire can identify bottlenecks in the process and help you make your hiring practices more efficient. 

Calculating cost-per-hire requires adding up all the external and internal recruiting costs and dividing the total by the number of hires within a set time period.

This rate reflects the number of candidates who successfully complete an application for a role at your business. To calculate this rate, divide the number of completed job applications by the total number of applications that were started but not completed and multiply by 100. Low rates indicate issues with your application process, such as a bad user experience or overly complicated and/or personal questions. 

This rate captures the percentage of offers that are accepted by the candidates to whom you extend offers. To calculate this rate, divide the number of offers accepted by the number of offers extended and multiply by 100. Low acceptance rates can indicate issues with your hiring process or with the competitiveness of your offer.

This category of metrics captures the state of your organization’s learning and development initiatives. 

Quality of work measures whether an employee is performing their work well. This measurement depends on the type of work. For instance, customer-facing work can be measured through customer feedback surveys, whereas the quality of patient-facing healthcare workers hinges on patient outcomes.  

Time to productivity measures the time for a new hire to reach the standard level of productivity expected at the organization after they’ve been onboarded. This metric helps gauge new hire training processes and company culture for new hires.

More measurement resources here: Take a deeper dive into employee performance metrics that you can use to inform your L&D strategy. 

Talent mobility refers to the movement of your employees both in and out of your organization. To measure this metric, you calculate the percentage of employees who have changed roles or functions over the course of their tenure at your organization, or the percentage of employees who have left your company to advance their roles at other companies. 

High mobility rates indicate that your employees have opportunities to grow and advance within your organization.

ROI measures the impact and efficiency of your L&D initiatives on your organization. Despite the importance of this metric, only 33% of organizations measure the ROI of their employee training initiatives due to some of the challenges associated with it. For example, many L&D benefits are qualitative and not easily quantified. Additionally, multiple factors can influence employee performance.

Check out this resource for a deeper look into which ROI metrics will be the most helpful for tracking learning and development performance.

This category of metrics captures the state of your organization’s benefits. 

This is a measure of the number of eligible employees that enroll in a benefit. A low enrollment rate can mean a number of things. It may be that the benefit is inaccessible, not relevant to your employees or that they don’t even know it’s something that you offer.

To calculate the enrollment rate, divide the total number of eligible employees within your company by the number of employees who actively participate in the benefit that you’re measuring.

Employee satisfaction captures the general sentiment of your employees towards your company. A number of different factors play into this overall metric: satisfaction with their day-to-day work, their work environment, their teammates, management, leadership, benefits, and so on.

To measure employee satisfaction, you’ll employ a variety of methods at different stages in an employee’s tenure, from quantitative and qualitative surveys to information-gathering sessions (both one-on-one and group sessions). 

And there you have it – a focused set of metrics that allow you to measure the effectiveness of your HR strategy. You may need to either narrow your set of metrics even more, or to include an expanded set of metrics to fit the context and goals of your business. But this set of 14 metrics is a good starting point to help you gather the data you need to track your HR initiatives. 

More HR and L&D resources: Learn how to set up a training dashboard to make for easier data collection.