EOFY Hiring Review: Metrics Leaders Should Track
The end of financial year is the right moment to ask whether your hiring is actually working and what the numbers are telling you.
Most businesses close out June with a clear picture of their financials. Revenue, costs, margins for the numbers get reviewed, reported on, and used to shape decisions for the year ahead.
Hiring rarely gets the same treatment. And that is a problem, because for most businesses, people are the single largest line item in the budget and the decisions made around hiring have a compounding effect on everything else.
If your team has been hiring through the past twelve months, EOFY is the right moment to step back and look at what the data is actually telling you. Not just whether roles were filled, but how long it took, what it cost, whether those hires stuck around, and where the process lost momentum.
Here are the metrics that matter most and what to do with them.
Time to Fill
The 2026 benchmark sits between 23 and 38 days for most roles, depending on complexity and industry. Generalist and frontline positions should be coming in under 30 days. If yours are running longer, the drag is usually upstream slow sign-off, a brief that is generating the wrong applicants, or a process that has more stages than it needs.
Look at this number by role type across the year. A slow average might be masking a specific team or department where hiring consistently stalls.
Cost Per Hire
In Australia, the average cost to fill a position sits at around $10,500 for a standard hire.
The number most businesses report is an undercount. Manager time spent reviewing applications and sitting in interviews rarely makes it onto the cost-per-hire ledger, but it is real spend. Research suggests unfilled seats carry a productivity cost of around $500 per day. That clock is running whether you are tracking it or not.
A useful EOFY question: What did it cost per hire across different channels? If direct advertising is generating volume but low conversion, and agency placements are producing hires that stay, the cost comparison looks very different when you factor in the full picture.
Offer Acceptance Rate
The global average offer acceptance rate sits at 75%, meaning one in four offers made is declined. If your rate is below that, the gap is usually one of three things: compensation that is out of step with the market, a candidate experience that has eroded enthusiasm by the time the offer lands, or a process that has moved too slowly and lost the candidate to a faster-moving competitor.
This metric is worth tracking because a declined offer is not just a disappointment, it resets the clock entirely. Every declined offer adds weeks to your time to fill and significantly increases your cost per hire. If your acceptance rate has dipped over the past year, it is worth understanding why before the same pattern repeats.
First-Year Attrition
This one tends to hurt the most when you look at it honestly. First-year attrition measures how many of your hires leave within twelve months and in Australia, a bad hire is estimated to cost between 30 and 150% of that person’s annual salary once you account for lost productivity, re-recruitment, and the time it takes a replacement to get up to speed.
High first-year attrition is a signal worth investigating rather than just accepting. It can point to a mismatch between the role as it was sold and the role as it actually exists, an onboarding process that is not setting people up to succeed, or a hiring brief that was not specific enough about what the role genuinely required.
Whatever the cause, it is worth knowing because if you are rehiring the same positions repeatedly, the true cost of recruitment is compounding in ways that never appear in a single cost-per-hire figure.
Source of Hire
Where did your successful hires actually come from? Job boards, referrals, direct sourcing, agency placements the split across channels tells you where to invest and where to pull back. In 2026, nearly half of all sourced hires globally are now coming from rediscovered candidates already sitting in existing networks or databases. That is up from 26% in 2021, and it reflects a broader shift: in a market flooded with applications, the real value is in relationships that have already been built.
If most of your hiring spend is going to channels that are generating applications but not hires, that is a useful thing to know before the new financial year budget is set.
What to Do With What You Find
The value of a hiring review is not in the numbers themselves it is in what they point to. A long time to fill might mean your brief needs tightening. A low acceptance rate might mean your offer is arriving too late. High first-year attrition might mean your hiring is optimising for speed at the cost of fit.
The businesses that hire well year after year are the ones that treat recruiting as a process worth reviewing, not just a problem to solve when a vacancy opens.
If you want to make sure you're taking on the right candidates for the role, why not let us find you temporary staff who can be transitioned into permanent employees if they prove to be the right fit? No more struggling to find people who leave after five months when they realise the role isn't suited to them. If a placement isn't working out, we have a straightforward offboarding process and will get straight to work finding you a better match, leaving you with more time to be productive and less money lost starting the search over again. That is exactly the kind of conversation we have with our clients at Express Employment Professionals. We work with businesses across Australia and New Zealand to take the stress out of hiring and make sure the next hire is the right one.
Sources
SeekOut, 2026 Recruiting Metrics & Benchmarks, March 2026 · JobScore, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks, March 2026 · Gem, The 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks Report · Talentprise, Recruiting Metrics: The Complete 2026 Guide · Scale Suite, Australian HR and People Cost Benchmarks 2026, March 2026 · Truffle, Cost Per Hire Guide: Formula, Benchmarks, 2026 · LinkedIn, Future of Recruiting 2025