Best Practices for Creating Metrics

This article contains tips, examples, and best practices for implementing and using the Metric Editing tools in Bullhorn Analytics.

Creating and Editing Metrics is only available to Bullhorn Analytics Enterprise Edition users with Metrics Admin permission. Make sure to follow the instructions in Creating and Editing Metrics

Note: This article was formerly entitled Advanced Metric Editing Best Practices.

Metric Editing Permissions

The ability to create and edit metrics is controlled by the Metrics Admin user permission. We recommend that you only enable this permission for a few select users.

When deciding who to give access to create and edit metrics, you should consider the following:

Metrics Admins should be experienced with data and metrics.
Metrics Admins will be able to create and edit metrics that may impact the entire organization.

Any changes you make to the field mappings in Bullhorn for Employment Type, Status, or Salary Unit must be reported to Bullhorn Support. Failure to do so may result in incorrect data being reported in placement metrics.

Metric Examples

Here are some examples of metrics you can create using the metric editing tools:

Copy an existing metric with a different assigned owner, such as Total Placements attributed to the Candidate Owner instead of the Job Owner.
Copy an existing metric to look at a new segment. Such as:
- Candidates Added with a Source of “LinkedIn”.
- New Candidates with the a Status of “Onboarding”.
Copy an existing metric based on a different date field, such as Total Sales in Period based on the Invoice Date.
Create a new metric with "Job" as the Entity and Metric Type. Set the Aggregation Type to "Average" and the Value to "Contract duration in days" to see the average contract duration across your jobs.

Metric Editing Limitations

While the Metric Editing tools allow you to create almost any type of metric, there are a few exceptions:

You can’t edit the number of decimal places displayed for a metric.
You can’t remove duplicate rows from metric results.
You can't edit, duplicate, or inherit system-locked metrics. If you encounter the message "This metric cannot be edited, duplicated or inherited from this page", contact Bullhorn Support.
You can’t edit metrics that have complexity that is not compatible with the current Metric Editing functionality.

If you need to do any of the above, please contact Support for assistance.

When to Use “Inherit” vs “Duplicate”

When making a copy of an existing metric, you have the option to either Inherit or Duplicate from the existing metric.

Inherit

Using the Inherit option will create a child metric that inherits the settings and filters from the parent metric. If the settings on the parent metric are changed, this will also change any linked settings on the child metric.

This option is recommended if:

You plan to continue inheriting settings like date field, aggregation types, filters and other fields from a parent metric.
You want to build on existing parent metric filters to further narrow down the scope of your metric.

Duplicate

Using the Duplicate option will create an exact copy of the original metric, which you can edit.

This option is recommended if:

You want to create a new metric that is similar to an existing metric but is not tied to that metric in any way.
- Example: Metrics reporting over the same entity (i.e. placements)

Metric Editing Dos and Don’ts

Do

Do read the documentation.
Do complete the Bullhorn Launch modules.
Do use the Test tab to ensure your metric is returning results as expected.

Don’t

Don't create multiple metrics and save without testing. Metrics cannot currently be deleted.