Quality of Hire - What Is It? Why Is It Important to Define & Measure?

What is the one thing that 88% of businesses believe will become the most significant measure of success for recruiting within the next five years? If you guessed quality of hire, you’d be correct! That’s because understanding quality of hire is what will help you build a reliable and efficient workplace more than just having a fast and cost-effective recruiting process. If you’ve never heard of it before and don’t really understand what it means, let alone how to measure it in your business, we’ve got you covered.

What is quality of hire? 

Quality of hire is a key recruiting metric that measures the performance of an individual and the contributions they have made to the company after they’ve been hired compared to their pre-hire expectations. This includes things such as how successfully they complete tasks, how their work has improved and how they help their fellow employees. While it’s something that usually can’t be measured until at least a few months after that person has been onboarded, the results can help you consider whether your recruitment processes are enabling you to pick the best candidates. 

How do you measure it? 

The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. How you choose to measure will depend on what is most important to your team and your business. Whether you want to improve your work culture, job performances or reduce turnover will impact your approach.

Probation periods

Giving new hires a certain number of days to showcase their skills and ability to adapt to the new role, with an evaluation at the end of that period, can help you reflect on the quality of your onboarding process. This is also a great opportunity to ask new employees on their opinions about their onboarding to uncover where they could be further supported and achieve better productivity sooner. These reviews can be unintentionally affected by biases, so having predetermined performance metrics in place may help improve the evaluation. Things such as whether they’ve hit a certain sales quota or achieved a certain level of custom satisfaction ratings 

Time to productivity

Date of reaching full productivity - hire date = time to productivity.

By measuring the number of days it takes for a new hire to reach their full potential, you can uncover whether there’s issues with your initial training and support methods. Remember, the acceptable length of time may differ depending on the role. For customer service positions this might be a matter of weeks. For managers this could take a number of months.

Net Hiring Score

You can measure how effectively your recruitment efforts are placing the right people in the right jobs using a Net Hiring Score. This process involves three steps:

1. Ask your hiring manager, on a scale of 0 - 10, how well they believe the new hire fits the role.
2. Ask your new hire, on a scale of 0 - 10, how well they believe they fit the new job.
3. Find the average of your results by adding these two numbers together and dividing the answer by two. 

If your final score sits between 1 and 6, this indicates a poor fit. If your final score sits between 9 and 10, this indicates a great fit. A score between 7 and 8 indicates an average fit.

Whatever approach you choose, using these tests to look at indicators such as job performance, employee engagement and even feedback from others in their team can help create a well-rounded picture of whether your recruiting process is helping you select the best candidate for the job.

‍Where to start?

It can feel like a daunting task trying to implement quality of hire measures, so let’s start with the basics; where can you easily start gathering data from today?

Start by considering your job descriptions. When you read them, they should clearly define what skills and abilities you’re looking for during evaluation. If you’re finding it hard to pick these out, this might be a sign you need to work on how you communicate expectations in your ads.

Talk to your hiring and training managers; what feedback do they have? Is there room to help them better coach, onboard and motivate new hires to set them up for success?

Consider putting together a survey that you can craft and send out to get an overall picture of the current state of your business, recruiting efforts and how new hires feel about the process they’ve been through.

If you want to improve your recruiting efforts, considering how you can measure quality of hire in your business is an important place to start. Not only can it help you improve productivity and reliability, it can also help you reduce your turnovers and find the ideal candidates you’re searching for.

Struggling to find the time? Have you considered automating your pre-employment screenings? At Checkmate, our user-friendly software allows you to run all essential background checks on your potential candidates with just a few clicks. Contact our team today to learn how to transform your recruitment with Checkmate.