Holly Fawcett explains the "quality of hire" metric—typically the percentage of new hires receiving satisfactory performance ratings within an initial period (example: 75 satisfactory of 100 hires = 75%). She covers definitional challenges (what counts as "quality"), concerns about using it to evaluate recruiters (since recruiters don't make hiring decisions or manage new hires), and reframes recruiters' role as builders of hiring capability who can influence quality by setting expectations, screening for skills/values, training hiring teams on interviewing, and supporting hiring managers. She stresses reporting the metric to leadership because poor quality harms business goals and customer outcomes.
Chapters
Many recruiting functions are moving to incorporate quality of hire metrics into their measures of hiring success. But some struggle as to what actually counts as quality. Quality of hire is typically a measure of whether a new employee meets the satisfaction of the business and is based on performance reviews. These can be periodic like quarterly reviews, but an overall first year performance is a good measure on their overall performance and satisfaction of new employees. Quality of hire is reported as a percentage figure how many new employees hired that received performance ratings that were satisfactory divided by the overall number of hires made. So if 75 new employees received satisfactory performance ratings within their first two quarters and we hired 100 people overall in that period, then 75 divided by 100 is our percentage figure. 75%. The higher this percentage the better. There is a tension here as to reporting on quality of hire as a measure of a recruiter's performance as being unfair. The recruiter is not the one who makes the hiring decision, nor are they the one who directly manages this new employee to drive that employee's performance. Quality of hire is therefore often left out of recruiting metrics because it is not within the recruiter's control at all. However, it is important to the business. Sure, the business made an offer to a candidate, they accepted, we onboarded them. But were they any good? Measuring our company's ability to hire great talent who perform well is imperative to our company's leadership. But I understand why some recruiting managers don't want to accept responsibility for the result of this figure. I therefore think we need to reframe our perspective a little. Yes, we are recruiters who facilitate and manage a great recruiting process and therefore develop our organization's ability to hire. But that capability to hire is up to us to build. We're the ones who are hiring experts. Hiring managers look to us for guidance and support with hiring. And when we make hiring managers better at being able to assess talent, to sell to top talent and secure top talent, then our whole company wins. What actions can we do as recruiters to improve quality of hire? Of course quality is relative. So it's about setting and managing expectations and having a firm grasp on what our company's values are of high quality. We can be intentional in our search for candidates who meet minimum skills and knowledge criteria and we can evaluate those candidates skills when it comes to formally interviewing shortlisted candidates. We can support hiring teams with the interview skills that they need to ensure that they're able to gather the evidence they need to to make a sound hiring decision that the candidate meets the skills and knowledge criteria. But also has the values of our company that we deem as quality. There are values like their innovation or problem solving mindset, maybe their leadership style, their personal accountability attributes, etc. So sure, while we don't directly control this quality metric, we can influence it. It is important to report this metric back to the business because the implications of a poor quality of hire are dire. Our ability to reach our business goals, our ability to meet our customers needs all come down to our employees. Business leaders will look to you as a recruiter for insights in how we improve the quality of the talent coming to hire managers and for support in how hiring managers even make hiring decisions in the first place.
