1. Climate, Not Weather
Don’t get stuck in the weeds. QBRs are not the time to debate individual missed hires or one-off process stories. Zoom out to the big picture.
Focus on trends: recruiting capacity vs demand, conversion rates, offer trends, experience trends and how these connect to business outcomes.
Build your reputation: consistently present objective data and trend lines (quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year) so you’re known for mature, strategic reporting.
Bring actionable insights: show how changes in start dates, offer negotiations, or headcount plans impact budget, culture, and delivery.
Propose solutions: don’t just report problems, suggest actions, like manager training or process tweaks, to improve conversion, speed or alignment.
2. Picking Metrics That Matter
You can bucket your QBR narrative into four areas:
- Recruiter Performance: Are recruiters hitting productivity goals? Use objective metrics and context.
- Funnel Performance: Where are conversion rates strong or weak? Diagnose and fix bottlenecks.
- Business Planning: How did plan changes (e.g., shifting start dates, role changes) affect your ability to deliver? Track plan change rate and its impact.
- Hiring Manager Accountability: Measure and coach on behaviours like timely feedback, interview attendance, and requisition stability.
Avoid calling out individuals here, focus on trends and patterns to drive accountability without blame.
The main area a lot of executives will be concerned about is variance from the targets set.
The best recruiting leaders, with the most successful QBRs can easily identify if the hiring variance was a product of the hiring funnel, recruiter performance, business changes or hiring manager inputs.
Showing this not only builds trust for the executive accountability you are championing, it is the foundation for an action plan to correct.
3. The Impact on Revenue...
Tie recruiting to business outcomes. Show how hiring on time (or not) impacts revenue, production, and the ability to hit team goals.
Highlight 'cultural debt'. Every rushed or negotiated change (higher title, comp above bands etc.) borrows against future team cohesion. Quantify and discuss this openly.
It’s important you communicate in a way that get’s the desired outcome. As recruiters we do this with interviewing all the time.
When we ask a candidate their biggest failure, we don’t want to know about the failure, we want to know about how they learned from it, and used it to prevent future mistakes.
The QBR is a very similar situation. If hiring managers are impacting the funnel, executives want to know the impact to the business and how they can help, so you must translate that message for them so they can help you.
4. Tools & Resources
Some extra tools to help you prepare for the next QBR:
1. The Unicorn Talent QBR Template
2. The Free Recruiter Performance Review Course
Hope they help!