Campus dashboards tend to be full of applications received, campuses visited and interviews conducted. None of these tell you whether the programme worked.
Offer acceptance, by institution
Aggregate acceptance hides the structure. Broken out by institution it usually reveals that two or three relationships are carrying the whole calendar — which is the single most actionable fact in campus hiring.
Twelve-month retention, by sourcing channel
This is the only metric that connects hiring decisions to business outcomes, and almost nobody tracks it. Channels that look cheap on cost-per-hire frequently look expensive once retention is included.
Time from final interview to offer
Not time-to-hire, which is dominated by scheduling. The gap between decision-ready and offer-issued is the part you control and the part that costs you candidates.
Re-engagement rate for pre-final-year cohorts
If you run early engagement, the proportion of last year's engaged students who are still reachable this year is the only honest measure of whether it was a programme or a mailing list.
Key takeaways
- Break offer acceptance out by institution — the aggregate hides which relationships work.
- Track twelve-month retention by sourcing channel; it changes the cost ranking.
- Measure final-interview-to-offer latency, not overall time-to-hire.
- For early engagement, re-engagement rate a year later is the only honest measure.
Questions
How many metrics should a campus programme track?+
Four or five, reviewed properly, beat twenty on a dashboard nobody reads. The test is whether a number has ever caused you to change a decision.
What about cost-per-hire?+
Useful only if it includes loaded interviewer time. Most campus cost-per-hire figures exclude it, which makes campus look considerably cheaper than it is.