Corporate recruiters sometimes have to juggle so many open positions, they have no choice but to triage the requisitions. So, is there a secret to establishing the right priorities? Yes. Focus on the positions that have the biggest impact on the bottom line, because that way your company is more likely to achieve its annual objectives. In fact, 51 percent of organizations that identified the roles with the biggest impact on revenues and profits achieved their annual objectives, according to the Aberdeen Group. Meanwhile, only 39 percent those that didn't identify critical roles achieved their goals. Establishing the critical roles also resulted in improved customer satisfaction, significantly better first-year retention rates (95 percent), and more new hires (82 percent of) meeting their performance objectives. The reason: Recruiters spent more time studying top performers in those positions and used the information to build competency profiles and identify the best sources of talent. A collaborative process also gives line managers an opportunity to weigh-in on recruitment priorities, which makes the hiring team more likely to agree on a candidate and make a quick hiring decision. A survey by Aberdeen did illuminate at least one a short-fall that could keep companies from making quick, quality hires. Although top performing companies are somewhat more likely to link new-hire performance to the original source, just 20 percent of the survey’s 500 respondents indicated that they have the ability to tie a candidate’s source to their performance as an employee, and 31 percent don’t even bother to track the source of new hires.