Could You Buy Yourself Out of a Metric You Rely On?

Here’s the thing, any metric you can buy your way out of probably isn’t a great metric to measure you or your team against.

Why?

First, if money is going to help you get better at something and you have the money, then by all means make yourself better.

But the most helpful metrics are the ones where money has little impact on the ultimate success.

Example:

If you can’t get enough candidates in the top of your funnel you can always spend more money to solve that issue. It’s a simple advertising spend issue. You can buy yourself into great top-of-funnel results.

What you can’t buy is the number of screened candidates you send on to your hiring managers. That’s an effort metric. You have to do that work. The metric is achieved will always lead to more results and more success.

2 thoughts on “Could You Buy Yourself Out of a Metric You Rely On?

  1. To build off of yesterday’s post, one of my issues with TTF metric is that I’ve seen it lead to extreme gamesmanship, where TA teams spend a significant amount of time and energy on canceling requisitions and re-creating them because of any number of reasons (position on hold, change in title, qualifications, responsibilities, and so on) to goose the TTF metric. I’ve also seen TTF as a “stack rank” tool for Recruiters, which is foolish especially if they have different types of roles, and leads Recruiters avoiding certain roles or portfolios of roles in order to get better TTF metrics. So in addition to buying one’s way out of metric, I’d also say there needs to be guardrails against manipulating/abusing the metric.

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