Most UK businesses will admit they’ve hired the wrong person at least once in the past year. The British Chambers of Commerce puts the figure at around 95%, and a third of those hires happened because the role had to be filled quickly.
For finance teams, those mistakes can be expensive. However, the sector is under pressure from all sides. There’s a 60% skills gap in commercial awareness and a 39% gap in stakeholder management skills. Brexit has made it harder to bring in talent from the EU, and National Insurance rises and wage inflation have pushed up costs.
Competition is also coming from new places. Fintech vacancies have jumped 44%, pulling talent away from traditional finance roles. In the pensions sector, which manages over £3.2 trillion in assets, 80% of administrators say they can’t hire the people they need.
Unfilled finance roles slow everything down: compliance work gets delayed, reporting deadlines are missed, and cash flow oversight suffers. Unsurprisingly, companies want to track how quickly and cheaply they can hire. The problem is that the usual measures are time-to-hire and cost-per-hire, reward speed, and cost-cutting, not whether a hire performs well or stays. That’s how the same expensive hiring mistakes keep happening.
The Limitations of Traditional Recruitment Metrics
Time-to-hire sounds like a smart metric. Who doesn’t want to fill a role quickly? Half of UK professionals have turned down a job because the hiring process dragged on. That statistic alone pushes many companies to rush. In finance, that rush can be risky.
These roles demand deep regulatory knowledge, strong technical skills, and good judgment under pressure. You can’t always spot that in a short interview process squeezed into a week.
There’s another flaw. Time-to-hire doesn’t account for complexity. Recruiting a payroll clerk isn’t the same as finding a financial controller who can handle ESG reporting and advanced data analytics. Yet the stopwatch treats them both the same.
Cost-per-hire has similar problems. It rarely includes onboarding, training, compliance certification, or the productivity lost while the role is vacant. It also doesn’t factor in the price of replacing a poor hire – often two to three times their annual salary when you count lost output, team disruption, and damaged client relationships.
In finance, those indirect costs are serious. A bad hire can cause reporting errors, missed deadlines, and reputational harm. But most organisations still judge recruitment on the same narrow measures they’ve used for decades.
Quality of Hire: The Foundation Metric
If one measure should sit at the heart of finance recruitment, it’s quality of hire. Time and cost will always matter, but neither tells you if someone’s good at the job.
Quality of hire does. It looks at how well a recruit performs, adapts, and adds value once they’re through the door. In finance, where mistakes can mean regulatory penalties or damaged client trust, that’s the measure that counts.
A good starting point is to review performance after 90 days against the key indicators for that role. For a compliance analyst, that might mean accuracy in reporting and how well they keep up with regulatory changes.
For a finance business partner, feedback on responsiveness and collaboration could come from internal stakeholders. It’s also worth tracking longer-term outcomes, such as:
- First-year attrition – whether people are staying, and if not, why they’re leaving.
- Internal promotion rates within 18–24 months – a sign you’re hiring for growth potential.
- Training ROI – completion rates and how often new skills are applied.
- Success ratio – the percentage of hires who meet or exceed expectations.
In finance, the stakes are high. A single poor hire in a reporting role can delay audits or create compliance risks that cost far more than the original recruitment budget. A strong quality-of-hire measure makes it harder for those risks to slip through unnoticed. It shifts the focus from how fast a role was filled to how well that person performs, ultimately keeping the business moving forward.
Advanced Metrics for Comprehensive Recruitment Evaluation
Once quality of hire is in place, it’s time to look beyond the basics. Finding someone who can do the job is just the first step. You need a team that performs consistently, stays engaged, and adapts to changes as they come. Here’s what else you should be watching:
Candidate Experience Metrics
How candidates experience your hiring process matters. It shapes your reputation in the market and directly affects your ability to attract good people. A poor experience can send strong candidates elsewhere – and they often don’t return.
Useful measures include:
- Candidate Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely candidates are to recommend your organisation to another professional.
- Candidate Satisfaction Score (CSAT): The percentage of candidates who report a positive experience.
- Application completion rate: How many candidates finish and submit their applications after starting them?
- Time-to-apply: How long does it take to complete your application form? Long, complex processes can turn people away.
Remember, 43% of candidates say their last job search was frustrating or took too long, and 66% feel burned out from it. Fix that, and recruitment will get a lot easier.
Diversity and Inclusion Metrics
In finance, a mix of perspectives leads to stronger performance. Yet progress has been slow. In 2024, women held just 36% of senior finance roles, up only one point from the year before.
Metrics to track include:
- Representation at each stage of the recruitment funnel.
- Diversity of hiring panels – candidates often connect better with interviewers who reflect a range of backgrounds.
- Retention rates for underrepresented groups.
- Career progression over time for diverse hires.
Source Effectiveness Metrics
Not all recruitment channels deliver equal results. Tracking the effectiveness of each source helps you put resources where they provide the most value.
Key measures:
- Quality of candidates by source.
- Offer acceptance rates by source.
- First-year quality of hire by source – not just who joins, but who thrives.
- Cost-effectiveness of each channel.
Knowing which sources produce your best hires, you can focus your budget and energy where it counts.
Manager and Team Integration Metrics
A hire isn’t successful just because they meet their own KPIs. How they fit into the team and support wider goals matters too.
Ways to measure this include:
- Manager satisfaction with new hires, gathered through structured feedback.
- Cultural integration scores after three to six months.
- Changes in team productivity and collaboration after the hire joins.
Skills Gap Closure Metrics
The UK faces a long-term skills challenge. By 2030, 20% of the workforce could be significantly under-skilled. Closing gaps quickly is critical in finance.
Measures to watch:
- Pre- and post-hire technical skills assessments.
- Time to full productivity in critical finance tasks.
- Completion rates for training and professional qualifications.
- Progress in closing known skills gaps, such as commercial awareness or advanced data analytics.
From Hiring Fast to Hiring Right
Hiring in UK finance has never been straightforward. The skills you need are in short supply. Fintech roles are attracting the same candidates as you. Rising costs mean there’s less room for trial and error. Focusing only on how quickly or cheaply you can bring someone in in that environment doesn’t give you the full story.
What does help is seeing the whole picture. Tracking how new hires perform, how they fit into the team, whether they stay, and how they develop their skills over time. Look at their recruitment experience and the sources that brought them to you. Watch for signs that you’re closing the gaps in commercial awareness or stakeholder management.
Over time, this approach turns recruitment from a race to fill a vacancy into a way of strengthening the whole finance function. You keep the people who perform well. You spend less on replacing those who don’t. Most importantly, you make decisions based on evidence. In a market where the cost of a bad hire is high, that gives you an edge.
Thanks
Rachel
About Rebus Financial Recruitment
Rebus Financial Recruitment provides a specialist and focused recruitment service to its customers, ranging from various organisations, including SMEs, to large PLCs.
We strive to offer both the client and candidate a seamless recruitment experience. Using our expertise, we understand employer and employee needs and match them perfectly.
To learn more, contact one of our team members today or call us at 01282 930930.
