Even a vaunted recruitment team can fill every open role, yet hire very poorly.
The proof is in the pudding when a person gets inside your walls. Do they perform well? Do they stay? Do they fit the role? Does it help businesses achieve their goals?
These types of questions provide the basis for why it is important to know how to measure quality of hire. The focus moves from how many people you put on payroll to what value they create once hired.
Hiring Funnel is Not the Full Story
Recruitment teams frequently measure simple metrics like the number of applications, interviews, offers, as well as time taken to hire.
These numbers are helpful, but don’t show that hiring is functioning.
Imagine two recruitment campaigns. Both fill ten positions. The others create employees who are there for long periods of time and always hit their numbers. The other makes employees who quit within 6 months.
The hiring numbers look identical. The business results are not.
Measure the Cost of Getting It Wrong
Hiring mistakes can cost you much more than the employee’s pay package.
This can include recruitment costs, training time, lost productivity, manager time, and the cost to find a replacement.
If the new hire leaves after a few weeks, much of that investment goes out the window.
By monitoring early turnover in conjunction with performance, it can show companies if they are implementing hiring practices that are creating avoidable expenses.
Compare Performance with Expectations
A practical way to do this is to compare former employee performance with the skills they were hired for.
So, a company may check whether a new hire:
Met the targets of role → Delivering expected productivity levels → Ensure quality is not compromised in work → Worked well with team
This will provide a tighter linkage between selection activities and future performance.
Search for Trends, Not Isolated Events
Having one bad hire does not indicate a broken recruitment process.
Organizations should look at outcomes by employee group.
Compare quality-of-hire results by:
- Recruitment source
- Hiring manager
- Job role
- Location
- Experience level
- Recruitment period
That alone can show you where your strongest candidates are coming from, and even areas to improve.
Don’t Ignore the Employee Experience
Other than performance, retention gives some insights as well.
The issue is not necessarily recruitment if there are turnover issues within the first year or so of employment with new hires. These factors could be due to poor onboarding, lack of clarity in expectations, poor management, or prospects of career advancement.
This is why how to measure quality of hire should incorporate data not only from the recruiting team.
Analysis of Recruitment Strategy and Improvement Points
Use quality-of-hire data to change future behavior.
So, a company might find that employee referrals yield better long-term performers than some job boards. And one other may find that candidates with certain skills hit the ground running sooner.
These insights help recruitment teams target time and money on better performing methods.
In the end, measuring quality of hire boils down to linking hiring decisions with actual business outcomes! With performance, retention, cost, and long-term contribution tracked by company, the recruitment process can shift from filling positions to measuring if a force is, in fact, recruiting the right people.