By Sorina Burlacu, Co-Founder at Talent Journey | talentjourney.tech | April 2026 | 7 min read
Tracking in GM is (still) underrated.
Here's what good looks like, and why it changes everything.
When a CEO asks how the global mobility programme is performing, most GM managers have one of two answers.
The first: a headcount. "We completed twenty-three relocations this year." The second: a feeling. "It's going well, I think. No major issues."
Neither of these is a metric.
Neither tells you whether your programme is efficient, whether it's improving, or whether it's costing more than it should. Neither gives you the information you need to make it better.
The companies that run global mobility programmes well, that consistently hire internationally without failed relocations, without compliance violations, without candidates who arrive feeling abandoned, are not necessarily doing more than the companies that struggle. They're measuring more. And they're using what they measure to get better.
The eight metrics that matter
1- Time to arrival.
This is the most fundamental measure of your process: the number of days from offer acceptance to the candidate's first day working in Portugal.
Industry best practice is under ninety days for straightforward EU candidates, under one hundred and fifty days for non-EU visa cases.
If your average is significantly above these benchmarks, you have a process problem worth investigating , and the data will tell you where it's coming from.
2- Time to productivity.
A candidate's first day in the country is not the same as their first day as a fully functional member of the team. Settling-in support, onboarding, cultural adjustment, and the administrative tasks of establishing life in a new country all affect how quickly someone becomes genuinely productive.
Track manager assessments at thirty, sixty, and ninety days. Compare these across relocations. If time to productivity is consistently long, it may point to gaps in your pre-arrival preparation or settling-in support, not just the visa process.
3- Cost per relocation.
This sounds obvious, but most companies do not know their true cost per relocation. They know the visa fees. They may know the relocation allowance. They almost certainly do not know the internal HR time cost, the legal fees, the accommodation support, and the productivity cost of a delayed start.
Calculate it. All of it. The number is almost always higher than expected, and knowing it creates the foundation for every investment conversation with leadership.
4-Failed relocation rate.
The percentage of international hires who either never arrive or leave within six months. Industry average is fifteen to twenty percent. Best-in-class programmes run below five percent.
This is the most consequential metric in global mobility, because a failed relocation represents the total loss of every cost invested in the hire. Tracking it, and understanding what drove each failure, is the fastest route to improving your programme.
5- Compliance violation rate.
Missed AIMA registration deadlines. Expired documents submitted to consulates. Residence cards not renewed on time. Each of these represents both a legal risk and a process failure.
The target is zero. Any violation above zero is worth understanding, not as a blame exercise, but as a signal about where the process has gaps.
6-Candidate satisfaction score.
A simple NPS survey at three points in the relocation journey: at visa approval, at arrival, and at three months in Portugal. Ask one question: on a scale of zero to ten, how well do you feel your company has supported you through this process?
The benchmark for best-in-class is above eight. The industry average is around six. The gap between those two numbers represents the difference between a candidate who tells their professional network that your company is a great place to work and one who quietly regrets the decision.
7 -Process efficiency.
The number of relocations managed per GM team member per year. In programmes running on spreadsheets without a dedicated platform, this typically sits between ten and fifteen. With proper tooling and process, one person can manage thirty to fifty cases simultaneously without the quality of support declining.
This metric tells you whether you need to hire more people or invest in better tools, and the answer is usually the latter.
8- Twelve-month retention rate.
The percentage of international hires still with the company at twelve months. Compare this to your overall retention rate. If international hires are leaving at a higher rate, the relocation experience is a likely contributing factor, and improving it has a measurable impact on one of the most expensive costs in international hiring.
Why most companies don't track these?
The honest answer is that tracking these metrics requires infrastructure that most programmes don't have.
You cannot calculate time to arrival without a system that records offer dates and arrival dates.
You cannot track compliance violations without a system that monitors document validity windows.
You cannot measure candidate satisfaction without a structured touchpoint programme.
Most global mobility programmes run on spreadsheets and email threads , systems that are not designed to generate this kind of data.
The metrics exist somewhere in the records, but assembling them into something meaningful requires hours of manual work that nobody has time to do.
This is where the investment case for a proper platform becomes concrete. Not just as a way to manage cases more efficiently, but as the infrastructure that makes measurement possible, and measurement is what makes improvement possible.
What to do with the data?
Tracking metrics is only valuable if you use them.
A time-to-arrival average that is twenty days above benchmark points to specific stages worth investigating, typically either the document collection phase or the post-submission waiting period.
Understanding which one allows you to act on the right part of the process.
A candidate satisfaction score below seven at arrival almost always traces back to communication quality during the waiting period, the months between visa submission and arrival when candidates hear little and worry a lot.
Addressing this with structured touchpoints typically raises the score by one to two points and meaningfully reduces attrition.
A failed relocation rate above ten percent usually has three or four identifiable root causes when you examine the individual cases. Addressing those causes, whether they are process gaps, communication failures, or support shortfalls, produces faster results than any broad programme improvement.
The data tells you where to focus. That focus is what separates programmes that improve from ones that stay the same.
Starting from zero!
If you are currently tracking none of these metrics, the place to start is not with the hardest ones.
Start with time to arrival and candidate satisfaction. Both are relatively simple to measure, the first from your records, the second from a short survey, and both give you immediate insight into the health of your programme.
Add cost per relocation next. The conversation this number enables with your CEO, CFO and leadership team is usually the most important one in getting the investment your programme needs to improve.
The rest follows from there.
Talent Journey tracks all of these metrics automatically for every relocation on the platform, giving you real-time data on your programme's performance without manual work.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice, book a 20-minute demo at talentjourney.tech