How You're Missing Out By Not Measuring Quality of Hire

Quality of hire – so important to measure but why such a struggle?

I was just reading the recent LinkedIn Global recruiting trends report (2016) and was shocked (but OK, not really surprised) that a whopping 67% of talent leaders surveyed said they weren’t measuring quality of hire effectively.  Yet bizarrely quality of hire came out as the most valuable recruitment metric KPI.

What is it about quality of hire that makes it so difficult to measure effectively?

I think the secret is in the report.

In answer to the same question, “what is the single most valuable metric that you use to track your recruiting team’s performance today?”, no surprise at number 2 was time to hire – well established as a metric and one of the easiest to measure.

Third, however was interesting. It could have been cost per hire, sourcing metrics, or candidate experience feedback?  Again, all standard recruitment KPI’s easily measured, and normally a standard part of a talent leader’s reporting pack.

Sensibly, however Hiring Manager satisfaction came in at number 3.  However much we may like to focus on candidates, talk about employer branding, look for whizzy ways to source candidates or institute some great new way of assessment, in the end our customers are our Hiring Managers.

They are the people that generate the demand for our work and in the end, are the people that will determine and assess how good our recruitment skills are both individually and as a team.  They are also the people that will judge the quality of the candidates we submit and how good they are as employees.

So, when we talk about the two KPI’s 1. quality of hire, and 2. Hiring Manager satisfaction, we are to all intents and purposes talking about the same thing. If the Hiring Manager is happy, and the new employees they have recruited are working out well (in their opinion!), then the quality of our hiring is going to be, to their definition, good.

Why is no one measuring Hiring Quality?

To measure the real Hiring Quality, we need to measure Hiring Manager satisfaction both of candidates/new employees and of the hiring process.

And this is where it starts to get difficult.  As the foremost input into a quality of hire metric is Hiring Manager satisfaction then we need to look at ways this can quantitatively be monitored and collated.  After all, in the end there needs to be a measure that makes sense and that we can act on.

With the recruitment tools and practices currently at our disposal this isn’t going to be easy.  ATS technology is good at counting candidates and measuring recruitment process timing – not setup to measure Hiring Manager attitudes.  However, with new approaches and technologies if we can start defining and measuring Hiring Manager expectations and views we have a chance to really get a grip on the Hiring Quality metric.

In the next blog, I’ll look at our solution in more detail.

About the Author: Howard M Flint is Chief Strategy Officer at Talenytics, the Hiring Quality platform. For 15 years Howard has worked at the interface of recruiters, technology and data pioneering ways of improving recruitment performance. For more information about measuring quality of hire, check out the Talenytics blog here.