Recruitment Harvest Report: How Do You Measure the Success of Your Hiring Strategy Over the Past Year?

Let’s begin with a simple truth: recruitment is one of the largest investments any company makes. When you hire a new employee, you’re not only paying their monthly salary, you’re investing in the time spent sourcing, screening, interviewing, advertising, marketing the role, training, and the inevitable dip in productivity during the learning curve.

With all these efforts and costs, how do you know whether you’re getting a strong return on your investment? What mistakes might you have made, whether in planning or execution? And can you truly plan for the future without clear data on past performance?

Failing to learn from previous missteps means repeating them again and again. And not knowing what worked means losing the chance to replicate and expand on success. The answer, then, is to stop guessing and start building your annual Recruitment Harvest Report, a comprehensive year-end review that evaluates your hiring efforts, measures the success of your strategies, and extracts the insights you need to prepare next year’s plan.

Why Do Companies Need a Year-End Recruitment Harvest Report?

The annual Recruitment Harvest Report is a comprehensive analytical document that examines all recruitment metrics throughout the year, both quantitative (such as time, cost, and conversion rates) and qualitative (such as cultural fit, employee satisfaction, and retention). Its purpose is to analyze the data, interpret the meaning behind the numbers, and link them to business goals to reveal how effective your hiring strategy truly was and whether your decisions aligned with the company’s real needs.

Its importance is reflected in several key areas:

1. Enhancing Decision-Making and Improving Quality of Hire

A year-end recruitment review highlights weaknesses in workforce planning and hiring workflows while providing full-year performance data. This makes it easier to compare results, identify what improved or declined, and define the changes needed to refine screening accuracy, strengthen selection, and ensure you attract the right talent, people capable of thriving and staying within the company.

2. Optimizing Budget Efficiency and Improving Sourcing Channels

The report offers detailed insights into recruitment costs across different channels, enabling teams to cut spending on low-performing sources and invest more in high-yield ones. As companies begin preparing next year’s budget, the report becomes an essential tool, guiding resource allocation based on real numbers rather than assumptions.

It also reveals market shifts, such as rising demand for certain roles or new hiring trends, helping organizations adjust priorities and focus efforts where they will have the highest impact.

3. Understanding the Candidate Experience and Strengthening Employer Attractiveness

A recruitment harvest helps measure candidate satisfaction and identify issues related to communication, delays, or lengthy hiring stages. This makes it possible to upgrade the entire hiring journey and increase offer acceptance rates.

It also highlights strengths and weaknesses in the company’s employer brand, helping leaders understand where they excel in attracting talent and where they need to refine messaging or enhance their value proposition to draw more high-quality applicants and strengthen competitiveness in the talent market.

4. Analyzing Cultural Fit and Improving Talent Retention

The report goes beyond counting hires. It reveals how well new employees integrate into the company culture, uncovers reasons behind turnover, and detects recurring resignation patterns, highlighting real issues such as poor management or lack of growth opportunities.

It also provides visibility into diversity and inclusion indicators and shows how performance, behavior, and culture intersect, offering the company a stronger ability to build cohesive teams, improve retention, and reduce the costs associated with turnover.

5. Reinforcing Transparency and Building a Historical Record for Future Planning

An annual hiring assessment strengthens internal transparency by providing accurate indicators of how each team and department contributed to recruitment outcomes. Over time, these reports create a historical record, revealing long-term trends, such as declining performance in certain sourcing channels or improvement in others.

This empowers leadership to forecast challenges and prepare strategically for the upcoming year, based on reliable, multi-year data rather than intuition.

When Is the Best Time to Prepare a Recruitment Harvest Report?

The end of the year is the ideal time to prepare your Recruitment Harvest Report. By then, the organization has gathered a complete and clear dataset covering all recruitment activity over the past 12 months, with all its peaks, dips, and fluctuations.

It also provides a full view of market behavior throughout the year, including periods of high or low application volume, offering a precise and comprehensive baseline for comparison and improvement.

Steps for Preparing the Annual Recruitment Performance Report

Preparing the annual recruitment performance report is a structured process that begins with defining clear objectives and ends with actionable recommendations that support hiring plans for the upcoming year. Make sure you build the report according to the following stages:

1. Defining Objectives and Metrics

The process begins by setting clear goals the team aims to achieve, such as reducing employee turnover, increasing retention, or improving quality of hire. Once the goals are set, the appropriate KPIs are selected to measure progress, such as time to fill, cost per hire, source of hire, and offer acceptance rate.

The metrics should also include candidate experience indicators, such as the number of candidates assessed and the offer acceptance ratio, in addition to tracking annual hiring trends like the number of open roles per department, top-performing sourcing channels, and conversion rates.

Defining goals and metrics ensures the report is focused and directly aligned with business priorities.

2. Collecting and Organizing Data

After setting objectives, data is collected from sources such as the HRIS, ATS, payroll records, attendance logs, and candidate experience surveys.
These include applicant data, interview evaluations, expenses, and resource usage; merged into a unified dataset.

Financial data such as advertising spend, screening and assessment costs, and agency fees should also be included to ensure accuracy and completeness.

3. Using the Right Tools to Prepare the Data

Before writing the report, the data must be processed using tools that support efficient analysis, whether through advanced recruitment platforms, BI tools, or specialized spreadsheets. Choosing the right tools reduces manual work and allows messy data to be transformed into clean tables and ready-to-use visuals for the report.

4. Structuring and Writing the Report

The annual recruitment performance report should follow a clear structure starting with an executive summary that highlights the most important findings.
The main body should be organized with clear headings and supported by tables, charts, and graphs, making results easier to understand, especially when comparing channels, timeframes, or cost metrics.

The writing style should remain concise, transparent, and objective, showing successes and challenges honestly so leadership gains a true picture of reality.

5. Analyzing Results and Crafting Recommendations

After presenting the data, the results are analyzed against the predefined objectives to identify what was achieved and what fell short. Strengths, weaknesses, and improvement opportunities are highlighted, followed by clear, actionable recommendations for the next year, ensuring the report provides solutions rather than just numbers.

6. Reviewing and Sharing the Report

Finally, the report is reviewed for linguistic and analytical accuracy, then shared with stakeholders such as department heads and finance teams to gather input and confirm alignment with their plans. After approval, the final report is distributed and becomes a key reference for planning future recruitment strategies.

What Are the 3 Most Important KPIs That Must Be Included?

Annual recruitment reports can include many KPIs: conversion rates, sourcing performance, candidate satisfaction, etc. but regardless of industry, three core metrics must always be included: Time, Cost, and Quality.

1. Time to Hire

Time to Hire represents the number of days from when a candidate applies until they accept the final offer.

Formula: Time to Hire = Offer Acceptance Date – Application Date

To calculate the annual average: Average Time to Hire = Total Time for All Hires ÷ Number of Hires

A high number indicates slow processes, increased costs, and candidate drop-offs. A lower number indicates strong operational performance and faster access to top talent. Breaking the metric down by department, level, or location helps identify bottlenecks—such as slow approvals or lengthy evaluations.

How Companies Benefit from Measuring Time to Hire

Measuring this KPI helps organizations:

• Avoid losing top candidates due to delays—62% lose interest after two weeks with no update.
• Diagnose internal workflow efficiency.
• Improve the candidate experience.
• Identify process bottlenecks.
• Compare sourcing channels based on speed.
• Improve workforce planning by predicting future hiring timelines.

Global data shows the average Time to Hire is around 44 days, varying significantly by industry.

A Tip for Recruiters

Differentiate clearly between:

• Time to Hire: Candidate journey only.
• Time to Fill: Entire vacancy lifecycle, including approvals.

This distinction helps locate the real source of delay.

Example: Near

Near (a U.S.–LATAM recruitment firm) found its Time to Hire was 45 days—too high for its business model.
By adding skill assessments early in the process, it reduced Time to Hire to 21 days, improving operational performance and increasing total placements.

2. Cost per Hire

Cost per Hire represents the average amount spent to hire one employee.

Formula: Cost per Hire = (Internal Costs + External Costs) ÷ Total Number of Hires

For example: If a company spends 200,000 SAR annually and hires 50 people, the cost per hire = 4,000 SAR.

A higher value often indicates heavy reliance on agencies, high advertising spend, or inefficient processes.

3 Important Tips When Analyzing Cost per Hire

1. Look at the full picture: Evaluate cost alongside Quality of Hire, retention, and time metrics.
2. Calculate the true cost: Include indirect costs like time spent by hiring managers, tools, onboarding, training, etc.
3. Analyze by department/job type: Helps locate the exact areas that exceed normal costs.

Benefits of the Cost per Hire Metric

It helps companies:

• Build accurate recruitment budgets.
• Identify wasted spend.
• Present recruitment ROI clearly to leadership.
• Benchmark against industry standards.

Example: Ericsson

Ericsson’s report revealed high Cost per Hire due to excessive agency reliance and paid advertising.
By improving employer branding and increasing internal referrals, they cut cost per hire by 70% and improved both speed and quality.

3. Quality of Hire

Quality of Hire measures how well new hires perform, stay, and integrate into the organization.

It focuses on post-hire data such as retention, productivity, manager satisfaction, and cultural fit.

39% of talent professionals consider it the “magic metric,” though it is more complex to measure.

How to Measure Quality of Hire

Quality of Hire is typically assessed through a weighted model combining:

• Performance (40–45%)
• Retention (25–30%)
• Manager Satisfaction (20%)
• Cultural Fit (10–15%)

These elements are merged into a composite index.

Tips to Improve Quality of Hire Measurement

• Define clear quality criteria before recruitment begins.
• Set mandatory checkpoints: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months.
• Combine KPIs with 360 feedback, goal completion, and retention data.
• Link quality results back to sourcing channels and assessments.

Why Quality of Hire is Crucial

It shows the true ROI of hiring by connecting recruitment spend to actual performance and long-term outcomes such as productivity and stability.

Case Study: Multinational Tech Company (AIHR)

Their Quality of Hire for project managers was only 38%. After redesigning the hiring process with structured interviews and psychometric testing, the score rose to 75%, reducing turnover and improving team alignment.

How to Quickly Pull Data from Your ATS or Recruitment Tools

Every action in the hiring process leaves a digital footprint. To collect data efficiently:

• Use built-in ATS dashboards (applicants, stages, processing time).
• Extract system logs that record every candidate action.
• Leverage integrated tools (assessments, scheduling, interviews).
• Consolidate all extracted data into a unified table for analysis.

5 Practical Tips to Turn Your Evaluation Into a New-Year Improvement Plan

The recommendations in your end-of-year recruitment report offer a valuable chance to turn data insights into a practical improvement plan that guides next year’s performance. To craft recommendations that are both actionable and strategic, follow these tips:

1. Start with a clear, measurable outcome.
Define a specific result, link it to a numeric target and a timeline, and clarify the exact process you want to improve, such as reducing time-to-hire for critical roles by 20% in Q1. This shifts the conversation from describing a problem to proposing an actionable intervention ready to be implemented in the upcoming recruitment plan, giving leadership a clear, trackable goal.

2. Connect every recommendation to an organizational priority.
Whether it’s closing a specific skills gap or supporting a growth initiative, anchoring your recommendation to a company-wide objective reinforces that recruitment improvements are not isolated tasks, they are strategic steps that support the business and align HR decisions with organizational priorities.

3. Preserve quality as a non-negotiable.
Ensure every recommendation includes a quality safeguard, for example, maintaining a certain hiring quality level even when introducing measures that accelerate the process. This prevents quality from slipping when speed or cost becomes the focus, and ensures that every improvement enhances performance without compromising talent quality.

4. Estimate both cost and savings.
Support every recommendation with a financial rationale. For instance: subscribing to Talentera’s smart recruitment platform to reduce administrative workload by ten hours per week while cutting job-board and agency costs. This creates a compelling business case for leadership and accelerates the approval and execution of proposed initiatives.

5. Offer digital solutions tailored to performance gaps.
Recommend digital tools that directly address the gaps highlighted by your data, explaining their impact on key recruitment metrics. This ensures technology becomes a core part of next year’s hiring strategy, not an optional add-on. For example: leveraging Talentera’s AI capabilities to increase screening accuracy and shorten stage-to-stage processing time.

Talentera: The Smartest Digital Solution for the Gaps Revealed by Your Annual Recruitment Review

Talentera brings together all your recruitment data into one unified, intelligent platform that tracks every step of the hiring funnel throughout the year. This gives hiring managers a complete, end-to-end view that makes it easier to identify performance gaps in speed, cost, and quality.
By combining automation, analytics, and precise assessment tools, Talentera transforms raw metrics into actionable inputs that directly support the creation of next year’s improvement plan. It gives your annual recruitment report deeper analytical power—and the ability to translate numbers into accurate operational and strategic decisions.

Here are some of its standout capabilities:

• Faster, unified data collection:
A single dashboard consolidates all yearly recruitment KPIs—no manual searching, no scattered spreadsheets, no switching between systems. This helps hiring managers build accurate annual reports effortlessly.

• Higher data quality through intelligent assessments:
Talentera enhances evaluation reliability with a library of 800+ ready-to-use assessments, plus the option to generate custom tests for any job title. Smart video-interview analysis—across audio, visuals, and text—ensures objectivity, reduces bias, and supports better talent selection.

• Reduced time-to-hire through automation and AI screening:
Talentera’s ATS, powered by Sanad AI, offers precise automated resume screening using customizable criteria and weighted scoring. Color-coded matching lists reveal true candidate suitability at a glance. Automation tools—such as scheduling and follow-ups—further reduce time and effort.

• Improved hiring quality with channel tracking and analytics:
Talentera supports multi-channel job posting while tracking the performance and ROI of each source, helping teams identify top-quality hiring channels by year-end. Its analytical reports uncover trends in conversion, cost, time, and recruiter performance, directly strengthening next year’s recommendations.

• Better candidate experience and stronger employer appeal:
Talentera provides a fully branded career portal with seamless registration, clear communication, and instant notifications—making the application process smooth, increasing completion rates, and raising candidate satisfaction and loyalty.

In Closing

Your annual recruitment review is more than a summary—it’s a strategic tool that gives leadership a clear understanding of a full year’s investment and performance. By interpreting the numbers correctly, you uncover what worked, where the opportunities are, and how to turn hiring from a routine operational activity into a focused improvement plan.
This empowers your organization to enter the new year with stronger efficiency, higher hiring quality, and recruitment practices aligned more closely with the goals of the business.