It is easy to measure hiring someone at the start. You like to tally applications, interviews, and new hires. The harder question comes later:
Did you hire the right person to begin with?
This is why it is essential to understand how to measure quality of hire for businesses. Why looking sooner than the hiring process can reveal whether new hires are succeeding, sticking around, and adding value.
Start with a Clear Definition
Quality of hire does not mean the same for all organizations.
What would be considered a successful hire for one business may have someone reaching sales targets faster than you can go to the bar. Or perhaps it is an employee who performs their work with fidelity and remains in the company for years.
Define the success of employees in that role before measuring quality.
Look Beyond the First Month
The new employee may do good initially in the week but fail later on. Another may take longer to learn the role, before they can step up as a top performer.
As a result, a measurable system should, therefore, measure how things perform over time.
Consider reviewing new hires at:
30 days → 90 days → 6 months → 12 months
It gives a better picture than an early impression.
Four Signs of a Great Hire
If you want to learn how to measure quality of hire, rather than using one score go for a few indicators.
Job Performance
Check if the employee lives up to the expectations of the job.
This can be anything from sales figures, completed projects, productivity numbers, quality measures, or other job relevant targets etc.
Retention
A solid employee who quits after only months on the job points to a flaw in hiring, onboarding, management, or the role itself.
A measure of how long new hires stay with the company.
Manager Feedback
Managers oversee new employees and have valuable insight into an employee’s overall performance, teamwork skills, reliability, and if they are developing the necessary skills.
Structured feedback is more interesting than informal opinions.
Employee Contribution
Does this employee drive the whole team forward?
This could be working together, solving problems, pleasing customers, or the enhancement of existing processes.
Create a Simple Quality-of-Hire Score
Multiple measures can be rolled up into a singular internal score for companies.
For example:
What are my key performance indicators? Performance + Retention + Manager Rating + Business Impact
A weight can be assigned to each category according to the role.
There is no universal formula. This method needs to be repetitive so that the company is able to compare hiring results along different time spans.
Use the Data to Enhance Recruitment
Knowing how to measure quality of hire is useless unless the outcomes drive action.
Should one of the hiring sources have consistently better performing employees, the company may wish to spend more resources in that channel. If the recruitment (or onboarding) process is such that few new hires stick around beyond six months, then that could indicate a need to review it.
Quality of hire must be a continuous metric and not only an end-of-the-recruitment report.
By tracking performance, retention, feedback, and contribution businesses can make more intelligent hiring decisions and effectively build their workforce through incremental progress.