We’re just catching our breath after having an amazing time at #ERE17. This conference was all about the future of talent acquisition, and we sure have a lot to look forward to. One major theme was using data and metrics to improve your recruiting efforts, and our very own Jason Putnam moderated a roundtable discussion around benchmarking and analytics.

Here’s what we learned:

Time to Fill is On the Top of Everyone’s Minds

Over and over again, we heard the most important KPI was time to fill—and with good reason. According to DHI Hiring Indicators, time to fill has been trending upward for the past 8 years.

Time to fill was 27.8 working days in February 2017, up 1.1 day from January, and only 1.8 days below the historical peak. BountyJobs data shows time to fill increases by 15% for C-suite-, VP-, or Director-level roles, and 41% for roles with salaries of $150,000 or higher. The competition for talent is heating up, and it takes longer than we’d like to fill vacant positions.

Employee Retention is a Key Challenge

Another big challenge our roundtable group discussed is when the time to fill KPI is met, but retention suffers. Many talent acquisition leaders are tracking—or trying to track—the qualitative aspect of things. Filling a position quickly doesn’t do the organization much good if it’s quickly vacated again. Talent acquisition professionals know that they need to keep an eye on these quality of hire metrics, but aren’t always sure how to do so when they rely on other departments to send them that data. Luckily, this an area where the right HR technology can help. In the future of talent acquisition, all systems will ideally be integrated so that data can flow where it needs to go, and you can track these important metrics more easily.

If you were at ERE, we hope you had a chance to stop by our booth, say hi, and take our 3rd Party Collaboration & Performance Survey.