That's why I'm excited to introduce a quality, cost-free option to readers of the HR Capitalist from a company I've become familiar with called APQC - The American Productivity & Quality Center.  I first met the APQC team when I led an HR Consulting engagement for Kinetix at their Houston headquarters.  I got to know the team and the business they're in, part of which includes benchmarking and best practices for HR practices at companies across the United States.

They help companies understand best practices in the world of HR.  They do the same for other functional areas, like Finance and Supply Chain Management, but let's face it - you and I are most interested in the HR Stuff.  At the heart of their business, APQC's model is to be a really strong research shop where they provide data and best-practice insights to members of APQC.

But you're a reader of the Capitalist - that means you're special.  With that in mind, here's an joint offer from APQC and the HR Capitalist with a basic trade in mind - if you take 30 minutes of your month to collect data you probably already have on your recruiting function and input that data into an online survey tool, APQC is going to reward you by provided you with a slick Benchmark Report that shows you where you stand in your peer group - sliced by company size (revenue), industry, etc.

Data you'll get back for participating in the benchmarking study includes:

• Total Cost of the Recruiting Process Per New Hire
• Recruiting Outsourced Cost as a Percent of Total Recruiting Process Costs
• First-Year Retention Rate (by Job Position Level)
• Cycle Times for:
  • Identified need to approved job requisition
  • Approved job requisition to acceptance of job offer
  • Acceptance of job offer to new hire begins

In addition to those valuable metrics, APQC is also going to include some really cool stuff if they get enough data - testing some hypothesis to see if certain practices (like outsourcing, use of social media, etc.) have an impact on the cost, cycle time, and productivity measures of the recruiting process.

It's a great way to get some insight on how you're doing with your recruiting function by partnering with a great research firm in a way that doesn't cost you thousands of dollars.  One of the great things about participating in research like this with a company like APQC is that the metrics are defined - time to fill, annualized turnover, etc.  The report you get will be a valid comparison across all companies in the survey.

The HR Capitalist isn't compensated in any way to market this to you.  I just like the team at APQC and access to the database they have isn't cheap, so we crafted an exchange/barter offer that makes sense - you give some data on one company and help grow the already strong APQC database, you get data back from hundreds of other companies like yours that helps you benchmark how you're doing in a way that you haven't had time, or possibly budget, to do.

GET STARTED ON THE APQC BENCHMARKING SURVEY BY CLICKING HERE