Quality of hire is one of the most important metrics for businesses to track. It’s also one of the hardest to define, and use effectively.
Commonly, QoH definitions are based on nebulous rules that don’t actually have any impact on the performance of your business – meaning the results they generate are rarely actionable. But creating a clear structure for understanding, measuring, and using your QoH metric will allow you to leverage the insights it provides to create palpable organizational effect.
Let’s dive in.
At its simplest, the quality of hire metric is used to track the intrinsic value which an employee brings into your company, both immediately after hire as well as over the long term.
Forbes marks Quality of Hire as the 3rd most important HR metric businesses can track, and quotes SHRM as saying that QoH is the “holy grail” of recruiting metrics due to the breadth of insights it provides into employee performance. They also call Quality of Hire a “super-metric” because it encompasses other indicators within its umbrella, such as employee performance and employee manager satisfaction.
Used effectively, quality of hire can help you to “diagnose” personnel problems within your company, find their source, and work to improve results and overall build a stronger employee base. Actionable results from clear QoH parameters give you the insights you need to not only see what your employees need to do their best, but also what are those “best” qualities you’re looking for in the first place.
The actual relative value of your quality of hire, or how “good” it is, depends heavily on your organizational goals. Some aspects of this will be consistent across most businesses, but those elements you focus on may shift and change depending on how and to what end you are leveraging your employee base.
Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Goal: Improving organizational productivity.
This straightforward example pulls on an objective shared by most major organizations across most industries.
If you want to use QoH to empower greater productivity, your team might focus on practical and behavioral aspects when assessing quality of hire.
Tracking time to hire, time to productivity, personal work performance and employee manager satisfaction will all be important metrics to track and uplift.
Goal: Closing workforce skills gaps.
Another practical example, this goal might necessitate focusing more on employee engagement to assess QoH.
In order to close skills gaps, your employees must be willing to engage in the learning resources you provide, and have a degree of learning competence which allows them to apply new skills within the workforce.
If this is a goal your company has, consider including learning competence, learning engagement, time to completion of learning programs, and time to implementation in your QoH metric.
Goal: Creating greater workforce equity and inclusion.
Believe it or not, this is another organizational objective you can drive with quality of hire.
The creation of a more inclusive culture is something which must be facilitated by the organization. But your team can still leverage QoH to move it forward. If an organization provides the resources and facilities in which better equity is possible, recruiting can work to ensure that employees being brought on board have the right mindset, learning competency, and EQ to contribute effectively to this effort.
In this case, your QoH might incorporate KPIs related to employee emotional intelligence, cultural fit, communication, and other soft skills.
So before you begin defining your quality of hire metrics, it’s important to consider your company’s goals. Having these objectives in mind will allow you to build a more powerful, more impactful metric that delivers actionable, effective results.
Learn more about the Quality of Hire metric here.
Now that you have your company’s QoH definition down, how do you track the relative value-add your employees bring to the table? No matter how many factors you choose to include, there’s an easy formula that will give you a quick-reference value that will indicate whether your hire’s doing fine, or whether they may need a little help.
To find the numeric quality of hire value, you first need to assign a number of points to each factor that goes into the overall metric. These can be even across the board, or staggered depending on how important they are within the company.
Your employees may then be scored a number out of the whole for each factor. Straightforward KPIs may be collected via your primary database, where others can be scored by managers and other leaders during performance reviews, or over time.
Next, you will add employee scores together, and divide them by the number of factors to get an average. Multiply this number by 10 to get a percentage value indicating the overall quality of your individual employee.
Tracking this number consistently over time provides a useful way to track improvements. You can also take employee scores as a total and divide them by the number of employees to get an overall QoH score for your workforce as a whole.
Quality of hire is a critical metric. Let’s say it one more time. And figuring out how to use it effectively can be your organization’s golden ticket to better outcomes. Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone.
The Crosschq Intelligence Cloud was designed to collect and house data specifically for the purpose of supporting and improving your company’s recruiting and hiring strategy. Our software takes your data and generates attractive, accessible reports from which you can pull whatever information you need to understand, use, and improve on your quality of hire metric.
And it’s even easier with the newest member of the Crosschq team: Quin is an AI-powered digital analyst that allows you to gain meaningful insights in just seconds. Quin combs the files for you so you can focus on the big-picture items that are going to take your recruiting strategy to the next level.
Learn more about Quin here.