Know what your HR numbers
actually mean.
A free field guide to the metrics every people leader gets asked about — what each one tells you, why leadership cares, and the trap most people fall into.
Turnover rate
What it tells you: how fast you’re losing people — and whether it’s a trend or a crisis. The trap: treating all turnover as equal — losing your best performer and your worst are not the same event.
Time to fill
What it tells you: how long roles sit open — and where your hiring actually stalls. The trap: tracking only the total — the bottleneck is usually internal approval lag or slow decisions after interviews, and the total hides which.
Cost per hire
What it tells you: the true, fully-loaded cost of every hire. The trap: forgetting recruiter time — usually the single largest cost and the one nobody counts.
Compa ratio
What it tells you: whether pay sits where your range — and the market — expects it to. The trap: ignoring a sinking ratio — that employee is already talking to a recruiter, and retention costs a fraction of replacement.
Pay equity ratio
What it tells you: whether comparable work is earning comparable pay across groups. The trap: calculating it without documenting your methodology — a gap with no analysis is an admission; a gap with one is a defensible starting point.
Training completion
What it tells you: who is covered — and exactly who is an open exposure. The trap: forgetting the supervisor promoted six months ago who never completed the supervisor version.
90-day retention
What it tells you: whether your hires survive their first 90 days. The trap: blaming sourcing — a weak 90-day rate almost always means onboarding is broken, not hiring.
Span of control
What it tells you: whether your managers can actually manage — or are just triaging. The trap: funding engagement programs while managers are overloaded — fix the ratio first; everything else is treating symptoms.
Exempt status
What it tells you: whether each exempt employee actually qualifies — six states set thresholds far above the federal floor, refreshed every January. The trap: inheriting “exempt” from a predecessor — misclassification averages $10k–$50k per employee in back wages. (The Dashboard applies your states’ current thresholds automatically.)
Knowing the metric is step one. Calculating yours is the Dashboard.
Every metric on this page — calculated automatically from your numbers, benchmarked, flagged, and exported to a leadership-ready PDF.
See the HR Metrics Dashboard
