Mastering the Recruiter Performance Review
If the best recruiter on a team always got the biggest raise, or best promotion, you wouldn’t be reading this article. The recruiter performance cycle is a mix corporate politics, stack-ranked performance KPIs, and building narratives that earn the value you are asking.
Telling the right story is an executive skill set. Storytelling your own performance will unlock bonuses & promotions faster than letting someone else do it for you
Performance Review Pre-Work & Best Practices
Align on your Goals FIRST: Set your goals, and track them. If someone blocks you from achieving that goal, track that too. The goal here is not blame others, but to highlight trends that help you deliver context to goal performance. For Example: If a hiring manager keeps changing role requirements after you’ve started to put candidates into process, it’s going to extend the time to fill.
Your Performance Rating is an Ongoing Exercise: Performance review cycles are the culmination of a year-long process. If you aren’t “pre-closing” your performance review (like how you pre-close candidates on compensation through the interview process) you’re losing control over your own narrative. Great performance are always managing this process.
Politics and Calibrations are REAL: It’s not just about hitting numbers without playing the game. Companies often have a limited amount of bonus dollars, promotion opportunities or other rewards to hand out, and it’s a DEBATE in the executive meeting. Managers want to keep their top performers with these incentives.
Make it EASY for your Manager to Advocate for you: Our metrics help you deliver the context your manager needs to advocate for your bonus/promotion/raise. Help your manager navigate deltas in your perceived performance by showing them metrics and walking them through the narrative.
Download the Recruiter Performance Review Checklist
5 Categories of Recruiter Performance
Production: Did you deliver hires for the business
The number of offer accepts is just the beginning. Now you have to manage the perception of production success.
Fills vs. Demand: Did you meet what hiring teams asked for?
Fills vs. Capacity: Did you hit the target your leaders set?
Hires On Time: Did hires start when Finance expected?
Filling 40 roles means something different if your target was 36 vs. 48. It gets even more complicated if you line recruiting manager wanted you to fill 36, and the hiring manager wanted you to fill 48. To your manager, you over-performed. To the hiring manager you under-performed. Both of those people will be talking about your work in calibrations.
Workload: How Hard Was the Work?
Not all roles are created equal. Contextualize the difficulty of your workload:
Average Job Level: Job levels directly correlate to pipeline health, candidate availability, sourcing needs etc. Tracking the job levels of your work helps deliver context to your work as your recruiting leader stack ranks your performance. (Need more details, check out this article about managing recruiting capacity https://www.headcount365.com/blog/recruiting-capacity-like-a-pro)
Unique Pipelines or Managers: Different jobs mean different interview processes, job descriptions, intake sessions, candidate pitches etc. Different managers need weekly updates, ad-hoc requests & change management. The variety of the work matters as much as the difficulty
New-to-Company Roles: How many roles did you fill that never previously existed at the company? This calibration isnt free. Or easy.
Two recruiters who fill 10 jobs each, did not do the same amount of work. Filling senior roles across multiple functions is more complex than running a steady pipeline in one team. Make sure your effort is visible.
Efficiency: How Did You Get There?
Volume without efficiency can be misleading. Use funnel metrics to tell the story behind your process:
Conversion Rates: From sourcing to offer accept. For more information, check out our article on diagnosing the recruiting funnel (https://www.unicorntalent.com/knowledge-center/recruiting-funnel-conversion-rates-like-a-pro)
On-Time Starts & Time to Fill: Metrics that drive revenue and forecast accuracy. Your finance team needs to know whey they start paying people. The hiring manager wants a full team. If you fill all your jobs but never hit the timing you'll need to justify this during performance time (see our narratives below)
Efficiency is a key differentiator because of the quantifiable ROI. If it takes you less hiring manager time to produce a hire, you’re giving them time back to do their day job that they would have spent interviewing. In building your narrative, comparing your conversion rates help unlock performance rewards—especially when compared to the company average or industry benchmark. This is great context for leaders with ultra-high expectations who don’t want to give you credit for the quality of your service.
Interference: What Got in Your Way?
Recruiters don’t have total control over the process, and must track how external blockers get in their way.
Hiring Manager Delays: How many times does a hiring manager action block a recruiting stat? Do they they extend time to fill with long schedule times, not filling out scorecards or showing up to debriefs?
Requisition Changes: Changing the goal posts after you’ve started your job impacts your ability to do your job.
Expedited Requests: Hiring managers who want something faster than your able to fill it shouldn’t be able to blame you for not filling it on time.
Tracking interference is tricky. It’s laborious to do, and you don’t want to get into a blame game— but it’s important to track changes and interference to quantify how these changes interfere with your work—-especially if you’re missing targets
Experience: How Did It Feel to Work With You?
Recruiter performance isn’t just output—it’s the quality of experience delivered:
Candidate NPS or Surveys: Do candidates enjoy working with you?
Hiring Manager Feedback: Do hiring managers enjoy working with you?
External Reviews (e.g., Glassdoor): Are you getting recognized for your work externally & helping (or hurting) the overall brand of the TA process & the business
Theres a tangible value to the way you work. Get recognized for it.
Building your Performance Narrative
Once individual metrics are tracked, the next step is putting together a narrative for your performance. While there are many ways to advocate for high performance, here are some ways context building can help you overcome perceived underperformance. If you identify a problem, it’s a great look to get in front of it and develop an action plan to help correct these issues proactively rather than waiting for your manager to do it for you.
Experience vs Production:Great experience takes time investments. If you’re overproducing, it may come at the cost of experience.
Experience vs Workload: Great experience takes time investments. Requisitions that require recruiter investment may come at the cost of experience.
Efficiency & Workload: Net new roles take more calibration and can create noisy funnels.
Interference vs Experience: Interference & changes make expectations management difficult.
Need Help Building Your Performance Narrative? Join our Community
Unicorn talent is a community of seasoned talent leaders who have run performance processes in the past, and can help you navigate yours. To get free advice, join our slack community and we can help you build out a narrative to maximize your performance incentives.