Recruitment KPIs that Matter: Tracking Success in the Charity Sector

Hiring in the charity sector often comes with a unique set of challenges. With tight budgets, growing skills shortages in some specialisms, and a strong emphasis on building diverse and inclusive teams who are aligned with your values, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with competing priorities. Using recruitment KPIs can help you decide where to focus.

When you’re under a lot of pressure, tracking data might not feel like the most important task. But understanding what’s actually happening in your recruitment process can help you recognise what’s working well and where you could improve, and make sure your hiring processes are delivering for your team, your organisation and the cause you support.

How tracking recruitment KPIs can help charities with hiring

Whether you’re hiring for two people or 20, tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) may be able to help you:

• spot delays in your recruitment process that could be costing you top talent,
• improve fairness and inclusion by understanding who is (and isn’t) applying and being hired for your roles,
• make evidence-based hiring decisions about where to invest your time and energy,
• create a stronger candidate experience, boosting your employer brand and building trust with potential applicants,
• hire quality talent aligned with your mission and value

What are the best recruitment KPIs to measure and how?

Identifying even just a few meaningful KPIs can give you the clarity to improve your hiring over time. Here are three key areas to focus on:

1. Efficiency and process health KPIs

These metrics help you to understand how smoothly your recruitment process is running. A process that’s slow or inconsistent can lead to missed opportunities through losing talented applicants, and a poor candidate experience.

Time to hire

How many days pass between posting a job and getting a signed offer acceptance?

How to track it: Simply note the date a job advert goes live and the date the candidate accepts the offer. Some sectors aim for four to six weeks, but in the charity sector it can take longer due to the approvals needed. But instead of aiming for a generic number, focus on understanding your average time to hire and reducing that over time.

Time to interview

How long does it take from application to first contact or interview?

How to track it: Keep a log to calculate the gap between receiving a candidate’s application and their first interview. Long waits can lead to candidate drop-off or signal poor internal coordination. If you find this is happening, then you might want to simplify internal approvals or set clearer timelines.

Offer acceptance rate

What proportion of your job offers are accepted?

How to track it: Keep a record of the number of offers made vs. offers accepted. It may also be wise to follow up with candidates who decline a job offer, to understand their reasons and look for any commonalities in factors like working arrangements, salary, culture or benefits.

2. Impact KPIs

Ideally, your recruitment strategy should result in finding talented individuals who stay at your charity, thrive in their roles, and contribute meaningfully to your mission. While it can be challenging to put numbers on this, here are some KPIs you may want to consider.

Relevant applications per role

Are you attracting candidates with the right skills?

How to track it: look at how many of your applications meet (most of) the essential criteria for a role. This could be done manually when shortlisting, or you could ask hiring managers to estimate this after reviewing applications.

If most of your applicants aren’t meeting the essential requirements, it may be time to revisit your job ad and job description to check what you’re looking for is clear and realistic. Consider whether the salary reflects the level of experience and skills you’re asking for—you can use our salary checker to benchmark your offers.

Retention rate

Are new hires staying long enough to make a meaningful contribution?

How to track it: keep a record of how many new employees remain at your charity after key milestones, such as six months, one year or two years.

If retention is low, it may indicate a mismatch between role expectations and reality, or issues with onboarding. It can also signal deeper concerns around culture. On the other hand, strong retention suggests your recruitment process is helping you to find people who are effective and happy working in your charity.

Values alignment/quality of hire

Are new hires meeting expectations and aligned with your charity’s mission?

How to track it: This can be tricky to measure, but is still worth considering. You might gather feedback from line managers about how well new hires are adapting, contributing and reflecting your organisation’s values in their work. You could also set employees a values-based objective to be assessed in their annual appraisal. Informal feedback from team members or reflective conversations during check-ins can also provide helpful insights.

3. Equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) KPIs

Fair and inclusive hiring is of central importance to many charities, and without data, it’s difficult to know if your recruitment is truly inclusive, or just well-intentioned. Tracking EDI-related recruitment KPIs can help you to spot where candidates from diverse background are engaging with your process and where they might be dropping off.

Application diversity

Who’s applying for your roles? Are you reaching a diverse pool of candidates?

How to track it: Use anonymous Equal Opportunities (EO) forms to collect data from candidates on their ethnic background, age, gender, and more. If you post a role using CharityJob Apply, you can get access to our free Equal Opportunities Reporting tool through our free ATS, to make this simple. Ideally, you want to see a diverse group of applicants that reflect the communities you serve. If you’re not seeing that diversity, it could be a sign that your job adverts and requirements need some adjusting.

Diversity of hires

Who are you actually hiring, and how does that compare to your applicant pool?

How to track it: Compare EO data of hires vs. applicants using CharityJob’s Equal Opportunities reporting or your own analysis. Keep the data anonymous and review periodically. If you’re attracting a diverse pool of candidates, but seeing those hired are similar to your current charity employees, there may be barriers in your shortlisting or interview process. These may inadvertently be affecting candidates from some backgrounds i.e. there could be unconscious bias or inconsistent scoring. Consider reviewing your shortlisting and interview processes to help reduce possible bias.

Candidate satisfaction

Are candidates having a positive experience, regardless of the outcome?

How to track it: consider sending a short anonymous survey after the recruitment process, or informally checking in with candidates. You could ask about clarity, fairness, communication and overall impressions. Consistently low ratings or recurring negative feedback may suggest your process is frustrating or inaccessible. A better experience builds trust, even for unsuccessful applicants who may apply again, donate or recommend you in future.

Start small and make meaningful changes

If you’re already at capacity with recruitment, then this may feel a bit overwhelming, but you don’t need to track everything at once. You can start with just a few recruitment KPIs that feel relevant to your organisation and build them into your process over time. You may want to review your KPIs every few months, or after each hiring round. Even small tweaks can lead to better outcomes.

Once you have some insights, you can use them to help you understand what’s working and spot things that might need adjustment for fairer and more effective hiring.

Ready to get started?

Try CharityJob’s Equal Opportunities reporting tool to start tracking diversity of applicants and hires when you post a job with us.