Written by
Chris Pitchford
Reading time
5 min read
TL;DR: HR OKRs are uniquely difficult because you're measuring people, not systems. The failure mode is using eNPS as the only OKR: a lagging indicator that moves too slowly to be actionable. The best people OKRs target the inputs that drive retention and engagement: manager quality, onboarding depth, career development conversations, and time-to-productivity. Here are 10 real examples.
Key Takeaways
eNPS alone is not a people OKR. It's a useful lagging indicator. Pair it with leading indicators: manager effectiveness, 1:1 cadence, development conversation frequency: that tell you if engagement is improving before the quarterly survey.
Headcount hired is not a Key Result. It's an activity. The outcome is whether you hired people who are succeeding: and whether you hired them fast enough to not slow the business down.
The best people OKRs connect to business outcomes. "Reduce time-to-full-productivity for new hires from 90 days to 45 days" affects revenue. "Deliver 3 manager trainings" doesn't.
Retention is cheaper than recruiting. A 10% reduction in voluntary turnover at a 400-person company saves more than a year of recruiting budget. That math should be in every retention OKR.
50% of leadership time is spent on manual coordination. For people teams, this often means manual headcount reporting, manual exit interview analysis, and manual performance data aggregation. These are OKR opportunities.
Why people OKRs are uniquely hard
HR has a measurement problem. The most important outcomes: team cohesion, psychological safety, manager quality, career growth: are genuinely hard to quantify. This creates two failure modes:
1. Measuring the easy things: headcount, training completion, number of interviews conducted. These are outputs, not outcomes. 2. Avoiding measurement altogether: "people work is too nuanced for metrics." This is a cop-out that makes the people team invisible to the rest of the business.
The right answer is to find the proxies that best predict the outcomes you care about, be honest about their limitations, and track them consistently.
OKR examples: talent acquisition
OKR 1: Hire faster without hiring wrong
Objective: Build a recruiting machine that fills roles in under 30 days without sacrificing quality
KR1: Reduce average time-to-fill for priority roles from 67 days to under 28 days
KR2: Increase offer acceptance rate from 61% to 82%
KR3: Achieve 90-day new hire success rate of 88%+ (as assessed by hiring manager) for all hires this quarter
OKR 2: Build a pipeline before you need it
Objective: Stop reactive hiring by building talent pipelines for roles we'll open in the next 2 quarters
KR1: Build active candidate pipelines for the 5 highest-priority future roles (minimum 20 qualified candidates per role)
KR2: Increase employee referral rate from 12% to 35% of hires through structured referral program
KR3: Reduce sourcing time per role from 3 weeks to under 1 week by activating pipeline (vs. sourcing from scratch)
OKR examples: retention and engagement
OKR 3: Make staying the obvious choice
Objective: Reduce voluntary attrition to below the category average
KR1: Reduce voluntary turnover from 18% annualized to under 9%
KR2: Increase "planning to stay 12+ months" rate in quarterly pulse from 58% to 78%
KR3: Reduce regrettable attrition (top performers leaving) from 7 instances to 2 or fewer this quarter
OKR 4: Build the conditions that make people want to do their best work
Objective: Improve the quality of the working environment measurably
KR1: Achieve eNPS of 42+ (current: 24) in Q3 pulse survey
KR2: Increase "manager supports my growth" rating from 3.4 to 4.3 in quarterly survey
KR3: Achieve 90%+ 1:1 cadence completion rate across all people managers (currently 51%)
OKR examples: learning and development
OKR 5: Make internal development competitive with external options
Objective: Make people feel like they can grow faster inside the company than they could somewhere else
KR1: Increase "I have a clear development path" rating from 3.1 to 4.2 in quarterly survey
KR2: Complete structured career conversations (not just performance reviews) with 90%+ of employees in Q3
KR3: Promote 6 high-performers into expanded roles this quarter (vs. 1 last quarter), reducing flight risk
OKR examples: onboarding
OKR 6: Make the first 90 days the reason people stay
Objective: Build an onboarding experience that makes new hires productive and connected fast
KR1: Reduce time-to-full-productivity from 90 days to 45 days (measured by hiring manager assessment)
KR2: Increase 30-day new hire satisfaction score from 3.6 to 4.5
KR3: Achieve 90-day new hire retention rate of 96%+ (reduce early-stage churn)
OKR examples: DEI
OKR 7: Build a team that reflects the market we're serving
Objective: Improve representation across the company in a way that's measurable and durable
KR1: Increase representation of underrepresented groups in leadership (director+) from 14% to 28%
KR2: Achieve 50%+ diverse candidate slates for all roles at senior IC level and above
KR3: Reduce pay equity gap to under 2% across gender and ethnicity (measured and reported to leadership)
OKR examples: people ops and efficiency
OKR 8: Make the people team invisible in the best way
Objective: Automate or eliminate the manual work that prevents the people team from doing strategic work
KR1: Reduce time spent on manual headcount reporting from 8 hours/week to under 30 minutes
KR2: Automate new hire setup process to reduce IT + HR onboarding time from 3 days to 4 hours
KR3: Deliver headcount and attrition dashboard to leadership in real time (vs. current: monthly manual report)
Common people OKR mistakes
Headcount hired as Key Result Hiring 20 people is an activity. Whether those 20 people are succeeding, staying, and contributing within 90 days is the outcome. Measure that. eNPS as the only OKR eNPS has a 90-day feedback loop and is influenced by factors outside the people team's direct control (product quality, leadership decisions, comp market). Use it as one indicator alongside leading indicators. Training completion as outcome "100% of managers complete leadership training" is activity. "Increase 1:1 cadence completion rate from 51% to 90% and manager effectiveness score from 3.4 to 4.3" is outcome. People OKRs disconnected from business outcomes Every people OKR should connect to something the business cares about: retention → reduced recruiting cost, time-to-productivity → revenue velocity, engagement → output quality. Make the connection explicit.
How Goal Agents help people teams
People OKR data is scattered: HRIS for headcount, survey tools for eNPS, managers' 1:1 docs for development, recruiting tools for time-to-fill. Assembling a weekly status update requires someone to pull from 4+ sources.
Brev's Goal Agents connect to your HRIS and people data sources. Headcount trends, attrition rates, survey scores: these update automatically. The VP People walks into the QBR with current data, not a spreadsheet that was assembled the day before.
FAQ
Should individual employees have OKRs? Individual contributors can have OKRs as part of a company-wide OKR system. The people team's job is to design and run the system, not to own every individual's goals. Keep people team OKRs at the function level.
How do you handle OKRs for work that's hard to quantify: like culture? Use proxies. Culture is hard to measure directly, but its outputs aren't: eNPS, attrition rate, performance rating distribution, promotion rate, 1:1 completion. Pick the proxies that best reflect the culture you're building and track them honestly.
What's a reasonable DEI OKR for a company that's just starting? Start with representation transparency and measurement: "Publish the current representation data and set a 12-month target with leadership sign-off." You can't improve what you don't measure. Ambitious representation targets without measurement infrastructure are window dressing.
How often should people OKRs be reviewed? Monthly is the right cadence for most people OKRs, since many metrics (eNPS, attrition, time-to-productivity) move slowly. More frequent check-ins for hiring OKRs, which have faster feedback loops.
See also
Written by Chris Pitchford, Co-founder of Brev | Former VP Sales, Ally.io (acquired by Microsoft as Viva Goals)
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FAQ
Should individual employees have OKRs?
How do you handle OKRs for work that's hard to quantify: like culture?
What's a reasonable DEI OKR for a company that's just starting?
How often should people OKRs be reviewed?
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