Increased interest in human capital metrics and analytics work has resulted in
more organizations reporting a larger number of metrics more consistently. It is
important to recognize that many organizations use metrics to measure or audit
their HR programs and activities. Historically, the use of such audit metrics to
measure the effectiveness of HR was identified by Cascio (1987) and Fitz-enz and
Davidson (2002). The Society for Human Resource Management has identified a
number of metrics that organizations can use to measure their HR effectiveness
(SHRM, 2010). For example, absence rate can be calculated as follows: [(# days
absent in month) divided by (Avg. # of employees during mo.) × (# of workdays)] ×
100 (Hollmann, 2002; Kuzmits, 1979). Another useful metric from SHRM (2011)
is cost per hire, which can be calculated as Cost Per Hire (CPH) = the sum of
external costs (recruiting) and internal costs (training new employees) divided by
the total number of starts in a time period.