Measuring Quality of Hire: Challenges, and How to Overcome Them

Quality of Hire is one of the most important metrics your company can track. It’s also one of the most difficult to measure. Factoring in multiple sources of data, an unlimited number of KPIs, and even your company’s unique definition of employee value, Quality of Hire wins out as the most complex metric on the market – both to build, and to use.

Why track Quality of Hire

If it’s so difficult to do, why do it?

Your company already has numerous strategies in place to ensure you’re hiring only the best employees for your organization. But not all talent acquisition processes are perfect, and from time to time you may make a hiring decision which you later come to regret. 

And bad hires are expensive. One study estimates that these unfortunate scenarios can cost a company as much as $17,000 each within the first year, when cost of hire, lost productivity, and cost of replacement are all factored in. Plus, in a job economy where record lows in the unemployment rate have companies in hot competition for available talent, finding and keeping quality talent is more critical than ever before.

Tracking your Quality of Hire metric (or New Hire Quality) allows you to continuously improve and strengthen your talent acquisition processes, as well as your broader talent strategy. By analyzing the value of new hires, your team can work to understand what made certain hires so successful, or so poor. They can then implement this newfound insight into future recruitment protocols, which will lead to higher ratio of good hires, and a stronger workforce overall.

It’s a hard metric to track, sure, but it’s worth doing.

Overcoming common challenges in Quality of Hire tracking

In this section, we’ll go into greater detail about some of the trickier aspects of tracking and utilizing the Quality of Hire metric. But don’t worry – we’ve also included a few best practices to take on that will allow you to tackle them with ease. Let’s dive in.

Subjectivity in new hire quality.

This is by far the biggest hurdle when it comes to tracking Quality of Hire. 

Because this metric is an amalgamation of numerous other KPIs which measure both quantitative and qualitative data, multiple methods of information gathering must be used, but in such a way that they can be brought together to produce a single, legible result. And key qualitative factors, such as employee cultural fit and engagement, have no standardized way of being measured, meaning companies often have to invent their own method for doing so. 

For many, the greatest challenge is this: a really effective Quality of Hire metric is going to be completely dependent on your organization’s unique definition of a successful hire.

The solution: Standardize how you gather qualitative data.

Many organizations are already in the habit of using both manager and employee interviews to track the performance, cultural fit, engagement, etc. of their new hires. But to convert this into usable, and importantly comparable, data points, these interviews have to be made uniform. 

If your New Hire Quality surveys now consist mainly of essay questions, consider adding a ranked element to all of them which will give the final result a numeric value that can easily be factored in with other quantitative data points. Of course, you should continue to invite respondents to explain their answers, which provide important context to the value.

Learn more about Quality of Hire questionnaires here.

The "timeframe" to measure quality of hire.

When we talk about Quality of Hire, we often think of it as a thing which is only applied within the first 3 to 12 months of the employee lifecycle. But it can take years of diligent tracking to generate a really useful result. Organizations that only track QoH for new hires are missing out on deep insights, and potentially dismissing high-quality hires who maybe just needed some extra time or training to get them up to speed.

Tracking Quality of Hire for the long term can be daunting, as the process inherently generates a ton of data for you to sift through. However doing so is still one of the best ways to monitor and improve your talent strategy.

The solution: Start now, and plan for the long-term.

Think about your Quality of Hire metric less like a tool for triage, and more as a supplement which you apply regularly to keep your company’s workforce healthy and functional. Consider for example soliciting Quality of Hire surveys from both managers and employees as an aspect of regular performance reviews.

Lack of utility from new hire quality data.

So now you understand the relative value of your employee. But what do you do with that information?

Even if you understand how impactful it can be, it’s easy to deprioritize the Quality of Hire metric if it fails to generate an actionable result. This issue ties back in with the subjectivity point: if organizations fail to realize that it’s up to them to define these critical KPIs based on their own values, a Quality of Hire result will offer nothing useful to the team.

The solution: Align your QoH KPIs with company goals.

Before you begin to design (or modify) your metric, you need to get a clear understanding of your organization’s talent goals.

What major objectives are being driven by your company’s human strategy? How is recruitment and acquisition being leveraged to support them? What skills, behaviors, attitudes, attributes, etc. do you need to see in your employees to make it all work? 

Building your KPIs out of these answers will help you to build a Quality of Hire metric that delivers real impact to your company processes.

Widespread quality of hire data inputs.

Because you’re collecting information from many different sources to complete your Quality of Hire insights, that data tends to be spread very far apart, across multiple formats and programs. This makes even collecting, compiling, and comparing that data a chore in and of itself.

The solution: Sign up with CrossChq.

CrossChq is a comprehensive hiring intelligence platform that works to make the Quality of Hire metric a power tool for business impact. CrossChq connects all of your various data sources to give you as complete a picture as possible of your relative employee value, in one place.

CrossChq also helps to analyze and utilize your Quality of Hire insights for optimized utility. Supported by AI, your team can instantly access numerous reports and understand how Quality of Hire is impacting your company, and what you can do about it.

Want to learn more? Sign up for a free demo today.