Using a Quality of Hire Index

Quality of hire has long been seen as the “most elusive metric” within the HR and recruiting toolkit. But as companies are figuring out how to better use it, we are also finding out just how powerful it can be. Defined, tracked, and applied effectively, QoH can empower your company to make better hiring decisions, build a stronger workforce, and move your organization forward. 

And there are a whole range of tools that can help your team to take charge of this metric. Today, AI-powered offerings (like Crosschq’s own Quin) mark the cutting edge of what’s possible for QoH. But low-tech strategies still make a difference when it comes to taking action from your quality of hire results. A familiar implement by now, the quality of hire index can provide your team with actionable QoH insights and bolster meaningful change.

Your Quality of Hire Metric

The value any hire brings to a company can give you important insight into the effectiveness of your hiring process – and this is what QoH does. Drawing from pre and post-hire information, as well as performance metrics throughout their relationship with your company, quality of hire can help you to discern where to find top talent, what to look for in your search, and how to train and support them in a way that empowers them to do their best work.

Depending on your company goals, your QoH will measure individual factors like:

• Employee engagement
• Time-to-productivity
• Manager satisfaction
• Job performance

And analytic factors like:

• Time-to-hire
• New-hire attrition
• Candidate assessments
• Candidate source

Sometimes called a “super-metric,” QoH is an amalgamation of all critical elements your team chooses to include in the metric, and delivers a quantifiable score demonstrating the relative value of any given employee. Or, quality of hire can be applied broadly across your workforce to give you deeper insight into the overall effectiveness of your recruiting strategy – and that’s where the quality of hire index comes in.

What is a Quality of Hire Index?

The quality of hire index helps to define the baseline QoH across your workforce. The QoH index averages all QoH scores for new hires brought onboard within a certain time frame – commonly 1 year.

How to Use a Quality of Hire Index

A quality of hire index allows your team to find and mitigate problems which may arise within your recruiting strategy. It can also help you to measure the success of beneficial changes you may introduce into your protocol. Here’s how to make it work.

Creating your Quality of Hire Index

There are a few things you should consider when creating your QoH index:

• Timeline. Your index measures average QoH within a certain timeframe: the more time you include, the greater number of samples you will need to incorporate. For clear and immediate insight into the current health of their recruiting strategy, many organizations choose to look only at hires made within the last 12 months.
  
  

• Granularity. Your overall index will include all factors contributing to your quality of hire metrics. You may also decide to create discrete indexes for any or all of these factors to get an idea of where the impact to your QoH is coming from. It’s more work for your team, but it can be helpful to know if one factor in particular is causing the change – this allows you to take more targeted action.
  
  

• Key factors. Your organizational goals may mean that specific factors within your QoH metric should be highlighted in the index. In other words, if something goes wrong or if a certain goal isn’t being met, what KPIs within the greater metric are you going to look at first? 

Once you have these questions answered, creating your index becomes a numbers game.

Doing the math

Calculating your quality of hire index is relatively straightforward. You simply take every QoH score from each employee brought onboard within your chosen time period, add them together, and divide them to get an average score.

In a formula, that looks like this:

QoH = (QoH score total) /(# of employees hired within the last 12 months)

To create more specific indexes, you can incorporate only certain factors in your calculation, or set particular parameters.

For example:

QoH = (performance + cultural fit + emotional quotient + new hire retention rate)%/4

Leveraging your Quality of Hire Index

A QoH index allows you to measure quality within your employee base as a whole, identify changes, and work to address the cause of those changes.

For example, if your quality of hire index is lower this year than the year before following the replacement of a previous candidate source, this may tell you that the new source isn’t working out. 

Or, if your index is higher than the year before following modifications to the onboarding protocol, this will tell you you’re headed in the right direction.

Crosschq can Help

Crosschq’s Hiring Intelligence Cloud makes it easy to find the data you need to create a strong and actionable QoH index. Data collected through application use or input via employee activity or one-on-one interviews is converted into accessible visuals so you can grab what you need when you need it.

And the newest addition to the Crosschq team makes it even easier: Quin, our AI-powered data analyst can search databases in seconds and generate meaningful reports which you can easily plug in to your QoH index. Or, ask Quin to make one for you!

Learn more about Quin here.