By: Shawna Armstrong
September 25, 2025
What gets measured gets managed.
Data-enthusiasts wave this motto proudly. If you can track it, then you can analyze it, and therefore you can control it. That's how you manage things, right?
That's what Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, believed. He measured success by the number of enemy body counts. And, he ignored the unmeasurable political, cultural, and public sentiment factors that ultimately determined the war’s outcome. This is a trap known as McNamara’s Fallacy.
Likewise, you may break down your hiring process into measurable metrics like number of applicants, interview-to-offer ratio, time-to-hire, and cost-per-hire. You set targets. Then, you live and die by the numbers.
I worked in this model, at a large recruitment outsourcing firm, for decades, where I learned that relying ONLY on measurable metrics can backfire in the same way. Tracking applicant volumes, time-to-hire, and cost-per-hire may provide you with numbers, but they miss what really drives hiring success and failure. It’s easy to fall into McNamara’s Fallacy, chasing numbers while missing the things that really matter. Fortunately, there are ways to set up your ATS to positively influence what you want to measure.
Managing by the numbers.
We ran weekly reports for leadership meetings, tracking the numbers against targets and comparing them to prior numbers. At first, the targets might have been a guess, or a baseline of a point in time, what a similar company’s numbers were, or reflective of what someone just thought they should be. When the targets weren’t met, we went around the room, throwing out ideas for getting the numbers up or down, respectively. The numbers determined the success of the program and our performance as a recruiting team.
In the beginning, the numbers looked great. The team cast a wide net and worked fast. We got lots of applicants and quick hires. But, over time, application volumes dried up, candidates were falling through the cracks, and positions were reopening and staying open longer. Without really understanding why, we simply focused on the numbers themselves, trying to fix them without understanding what was actually impacting them.
We shared the numbers with the Recruiters, those whose direct efforts supposedly created them (quite possibly with their hands tied behind their backs). Leadership wielded the numbers like a performance yardstick. Kyle is failing to meet expectations. Chad is exceeding them. What are you going to do to improve your numbers, Kyle?
Meanwhile, we’d churned through the local talent pool, burning bridges along the way. That $10K billboard ad didn’t bring in any applications. Candidates were ghosting, or we’d lost track of some. New hires kept leaving after they were trained. Hiring managers were yelling at us every week. And, we were starting from scratch every time we had a new opening.
We were trying to drive the numbers up or down without trying to solve for less quantifiable but critical factors like limiting market conditions, reasons for leaving, candidate experience, friction in the process, dispersed information, inability to be proactive, and lack of effectiveness.
By relying only on what’s easy to measure, we’d fallen into McNamara’s fallacy - focusing on what can be counted while neglecting what truly counts.
Ignoring what you can’t measure.
Companies may tend to disregard anecdotal information, the little things you hear or notice, brushing them aside as “just the way things are,” “not much we can do about it,” or “some people just like to complain.” Things were happening that we were ignoring. Because we couldn’t measure them, we just accepted them.
Candidates weren't responding, saying they weren’t interested in the position or in working for the company, failing to schedule or show up for phone screens or interviews, saying they were no longer interested in moving forward, declining offers, or jumping ship soon after hire. And, we just accounted for it.
Recruiters were complaining about being buried in unqualified applications, candidates asking for “too much money,” not getting clear position requirements, hiring managers dragging their feet or being too picky, and receiving incomplete candidate feedback or no feedback at all. Since we had a larger team, Recruiters were competing with each other in desperate attempts to maintain their own numbers, instead of collaborating to win as a team. I found myself spending too much time mediating because Chad stole Kyle's candidates. And, we just dealt with it.
Hiring managers were complaining about the lack of qualified candidates and recruiting's inability to fill their open roles. And, we just put up with it and did our best to reassure them.
Stuck in reactive mode.
We were feeling the heat, fielding angry calls, and throwing strategies against the wall. The bucket had holes in it, and instead of plugging the holes, we were looking for new places to find more water. What if we try that niche job board? Or a radio ad? Let's try printing up flyers with QR codes and blanketing local gyms, grocery stores, and parking lots. Community-based orgs. A career fair booth. A sign-on bonus! Paid ads, geofencing, retargeting, profile aggregators, contact finders… A contest. A PIP for Kyle. Ummmm…. what else can we try? We have to improve these numbers!
No one was asking, “What's causing the numbers to go in the wrong direction in the first place, and how do we solve for THAT?”
Instead, we scrambled for possible (rather than actual) explanations, desperately trying to come up with newer, more innovative sourcing and marketing ideas that might do the trick. We fed hiring managers empty promises to kick the can further down the road and buy another week of trying for better results and improved numbers.
And the cycle repeated. Run reports. Try to explain the numbers to leadership. Put the heat on Recruiters. Make promises to hiring managers. Hope and pray. Worst of all, maybe even make the wrong hires out of desperation.
Quality? No. This was not a quality program. It was a recruiting sweatshop. Get more speed. Get more volume. Quality is rarely the result of a reactive strategy. Especially when you don’t know exactly what you’re reacting to.
Many of the answers were in the passing comments coming out of the mouths of candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers.
The answers in what you’re not measuring.
You can’t automate measurement of elusive or occasional information like what former employees tell their family, friends, and strangers on the internet, what compels people to apply or keep scrolling, why applicants ghost, how your process makes them feel about your company, how much time is wasted on administrative tasks, the ripple-effects of bad hires and positions sitting open, or how proactive you’re being.
But, it’s all important.
Even the one-off anecdotal unmeasureables can help explain what might be wrong. A competitor up the road is offering more money. You reached out to 39 prospects and only 1 responded. A candidate left the interview in tears. You rejected someone who came highly recommended by a referral. It took 87 days to fill the position, and the hire was already in your database. You lost out on that candidate because he didn’t reply, and you forgot about him. You lost out on another because the hiring manager took too long, and he got another offer. Another candidate ticked every box, but the hiring manager didn’t like her tattoos.
Small instances like these may be indicators of bigger problems. They’re like the little wind changes that signal a coming storm.
When you pay attention to all the things you don’t formally measure, you can uncover the root causes that impact what you do measure. They can signal things like ineffective marketing and outreach, market issues, gaps and bottlenecks in your hiring process, ineffective screening, or failing to make use of available ATS features and automations.
Each of those is a distinctly different cause, with a distinctly different solution. Solving for them, solving for the RIGHT problems, increases the QUALITY of the system or process, which, in turn, helps drive the numbers in the right direction.
No more “try this, try that” in hopes of positively influencing them.
If you build the system strictly for speed and low cost, you can’t expect the result to be quality. However, if you build the system for quality, you can expect speed and low cost to be the result.
Start with quality. It’s the only way to get the trifecta.
A high-quality system will help you attract and process people quickly, limit wasteful spending on experimental strategies, and minimize financial consequences.
Manage what you can’t measure.
There are 3 main components of any hiring program:
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- Your Story
- Your Screening
- Your System
Story and Screening will be addressed in separate newsletters, but here are some ways you can build some quality into your system.
First, what is your system? It’s your hiring process - your workflow steps - plus the tools you use to deliver them. Ideally, your tools include an applicant tracking system (ATS). And, your toolkit may also include job descriptions, scheduling apps, screening and interview guides, assessments, or background check vendors.
Below are 10 ways you can build the unmeasurable quality into your system. Note, not every ATS will have all available features. A standalone ATS is more likely to have more of them than an HRIS with a Recruit/Hiring feature.
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- Customize the workflow - Set it to mirror the actual logistical steps/stages in your hiring process. This will help you track applicants easily as they move through the process, and ensure you have an associated step in the system for everything you do.
- Add custom dispositions - These are your “not hired” reasons. It allows you to attach custom email templates to personalize communications and provide you with more complete and accurate historical information.
- Write a variety of email templates - Write them for almost every step and disposition. Write them like a human with a soul, one who appreciates their interest, respects their efforts, and cares that job searching is extremely discouraging.
- Attach the templates - Attach them to steps and dispositions to automate communication, and to ensure all applicants are communicated with throughout the entire process, as well as when they are rejected.
- Delivered/Opened tracking - Sometimes the candidate’s email address is wrong, and sometimes your messages go to junk mail. Don’t assume they’ve ghosted or let them fall through the cracks. If they haven’t opened the email, you can call them.
- Use digital prescreens - This will help you assess must-haves and nice-to-haves more quickly than a resume scan.
- Use knockout questions - This automation will save you from having to review, disposition, and communicate with unqualified applicants.
- Tag “great future hires” - Create a tagging system or disposition for the strong ones that you can't hire yet, so you can quickly retrieve them for future openings.
- Use sync/integration features - Calendar sync and scheduling app integrations allow for collaborative scheduling and applicant self-scheduling, with all appointments in both places - your work calendar and the candidates’ records in the ATS. Use other integrations for streamlined data transfer and consolidation with other tools/vendors such as background checks, assessments, HRIS, and payroll systems.
- Use digital forms - Create custom offer letters inside the ATS and send onboarding paperwork that new hires can complete and sign digitally for convenience and efficiency.
By focusing ONLY on measurable metrics, it’s easy to fall into McNamara’s Fallacy, chasing numbers while missing the things that really matter. Candidate experience, clear and timely communication, a well-organized and convenient process, proactive team behavior, and the small cues and patterns that (correctly or incorrectly) indicate your company’s culture all influence outcomes in ways numbers can’t capture. Setting up your ATS to manage these factors can improve your hiring process, prevent wasted effort, and get better results. This way, you not only hire faster and cheaper but also create a system that works well over the long term.