It will be especially useful for organisations that have specific initiatives around rehires, such as an alumni tracking process or alumni networks.
Description
Rehires as a percentage of total hires.
Formula
Rehires / Hires * 100
Interpretation
Rehire Rate indicates the percentage of external hires during the period who are former employees of the organisation. Rehires are seen as desirable by many organisations because they typically require less investment in recruiting and onboarding.
Their productivity ramp-up time is typically less than that of employees new to the organisation and they may already have a strong understanding of organisational history, processes and culture.
Organisations generally make offers to alumni who performed well during their former period of tenure, reducing the uncertainty of future performance inherent in the hiring process.
An employer who actively recruits former employees, through alumni tracking tools or other initiatives, can use this measure to gauge the success of those initiatives. The measure can also be broadly useful as a lagging indicator of labour market changes and as a potential leading indicator of onboarding and productivity costs.
For example, an increasing Rehire Rate with steady hiring volume and without increased focus on a rehire program may indicate an improvement in the organisation’s employment offer relative to talent competitors.
Higher relative volume of rehires means that today ‘s hires are likely to require less training and ramp-up effort in the immediate future.
Data Sourcing
Organisations typically source data for this measure from a job table in an HRIS, where rehires are typically flagged by different action codes than other hires.
Analysis
It is helpful to analyse this measure to isolate any populations targeted by rehire initiatives, such as by occupation, job function, job family, age or location. It is also helpful to analyse Rehire Rate by other dimensions for which recruiting strategies are likely to vary, such as by organisational unit and employment level.
Limitations
Rehire Rate measures the level of rehires relative to the magnitude of total hires and does not indicate hiring volume relative to the size of the workforce. It does not indicate the level of tenure the employee previously had with the organisation prior to terminating. It also does not indicate the duration of an employee’s time away from the organisation.
Targets
Targets for Rehire Rate may be most useful when set on an absolute basis rather than relative to a benchmark group, due to variation in organisations’ hiring volumes and the potential for inconsistency in quality of rehire across organisations (e.g. an organisation seeking to rehire only high-performers versus one seeking to rehire both high- and mid-performers).
However, organisations that find advantages to hiring former employees and that are comfortable with the appropriateness of the benchmark group would target moving results toward the 751 percentile.
Absolute targets will depend heavily on the overall hiring activity of the organisation and the intensiveness of rehire initiatives. Employers especially focused on rehires as a recruitment source are likely to target moving results toward 10 to 20 per cent per year.