How can you use pirate metrics in talent acquisition?

Here’s an idea we came up with: could you leverage pirate metrics in talent acquisition, too?

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If you’re not familiar with the concept of pirate metrics, let’s start with what the AAARRR pirate funnel stands for. What are pirate metrics? Basically, the Pirate Metric name comes from AARRR! – that’s what pirates say, so nothing deeper with that.

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Many SaaS companies are familiar with pirate metrics as a way of measuring customer behavior to leverage the information for competitive advantage: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral.

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These are the things where the growth of your SaaS business stems from. But as we know, talent acquisition is an important aspect of growing your SaaS company, too.

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With the help of pirate metrics, you can identify growth bottlenecks in the different stages of the customer journey and make sure that all of the stages function correctly. These are the things where the growth of your SaaS business stems from.

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As we know, talent acquisition is an important aspect of growing your SaaS company, too. When you have high growth goals, you want to make sure to also have a great strategy for attracting, hiring and retaining talent. Without this, your ability to grow will be threatened and your recruitment efforts are just endless, risky and expensive ad hoc.

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Without a great talent acquisition strategy, your ability to grow will be threatened and your recruitment efforts are just endless, risky and expensive ad hoc.

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Pirate metrics are a perfect tool to make your talent acquisition function more efficiently. They guide you to choose relevant actions for recruitment and employer branding, and ditch the ineffective ones.

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What kind of pirate metrics could you choose for talent acquisition?

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The idea is that every company should choose relevant metrics to each of the stages. The pirate funnel stays the same, but the particular metrics can change according to the company’s business and hiring needs.

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Pirate metrics in talent acquisition measure the following things:

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AWARENESS – How big is our talent audience consisting of the people that know about our company as an employer? How many people do we reach on SoMe / our careersite?

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ACQUISITION – How many talents agree to have an intro discussion with us? How many inbound leads or candidates can we get?

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ACTIVATION – How many of these candidates are a match to us; accept our offer and become our employees?

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RETENTION – How long do our employees stay in the company? How many will churn during a year?

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REVENUE – How much revenue are these talents bringing in during the employment? How soon are they profitable (how effective is our onboarding)?

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REFERRAL – Will our talents recommend us as a workplace to their peers? How many churned talents return? What is the employee happiness rate?

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If you look deeper into these metrics, you start to see talent acquisition in a new way – as an ongoing process that doesn’t end when the contracts are signed. It’s very different to the traditional way of thinking about recruitment as a temporary, two-week, campaign-like project.

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If you want to make profitable hiring decisions, you should look at talent acquisition as an ongoing process that doesn’t end when the contracts are signed.

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You might have also noticed that time-to-hire is not included in the funnel as a relevant metric. Here’s why: When you want to make profitable hiring decisions, you want to have the optimal period of time of getting to know each other with your candidates – before they join your company.

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How to use pirate metrics to focus on the right things?

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A hallmark for a good strategy is to have only a few focus points. If you have too many, you simply won’t succeed in all of them. If you want to succeed in the most important things remarkably, you need to choose these things as your focus points.

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The same idea holds true in using pirate metrics, too. The idea is NOT to have 6 focus points – to choose each stage as a focus. It’s important to decide which of them to focus on.

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That’s why you should use pirate metrics first to identify where your bottlenecks are.

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For example, looking at the pirate metrics you could come to the conclusion that:

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• Your current employees are happy, and want to stay for a couple of years. They are profitable to your business, so there’s no problem with these things.
• If you can get new candidates to agree to have the first discussion with you, you are likely to be able to sell the idea of your company to them and they intuitively understand it.
• However, the hiring bottleneck seems to be that the best candidates are excited to discuss with you‍, but not ready to change jobs just yet. They want to follow your journey and “keep in touch”.
• ‍This is because they hadn’t heard of your company before the first discussion. (Few people will change their current job to a new one after a couple of touch points with a new brand!)
• It can be concluded from this, that your bottleneck is in employer brand awareness – your ideal candidates should be able to follow your journey for a longer period of time to make the decision to join your team.
• ‍You should choose employer branding and building awareness by means of strategic marketing & communications as one of the key focus points for your talent acquisition strategy.

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When you have identified your talent acquisition bottlenecks, the next step would be to create a strategy and an action plan to tackle these challenges in the coming months. The idea is also to change the focus points when needed, to make the whole process work as efficiently as possible.

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Following a great and focused action plan for a few months will allow you to:

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• Take your talent acquisition to the strategic level
• Ditch ineffective, risky and endless ad hoc
• Increase the competitiveness of your business
• Lower the talent acquisition costs and decrease the risk of bad recruitments
• Make the best talents for your business want to join your team

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Read more about:

Employer branding 👉

Building talent pipelines 👉

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