Quality of Hire: Strategies to Measure & Improve This Metric

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Identify what quality of hire means in your organization, how you’ll measure it — and here are a few ways to recruit better job candidates

Do you feel a pang of concern each time you need to launch a candidate search? It’s happened before: you take candidates through a long, costly and arduous recruiting process — only to bring hire a person who ultimately doesn’t mesh with your team or hops to the next job opportunity at the drop of a hat?

That pang is warranted! Annual turnover rate for various industries ranges 5-20% and costs at least $4,000 per hire. According to some studies, replacing an entry-level position can cost as much as 40% of an employee’s salary.

What is quality of hire?

Quality of hire is how well a candidate matches what you were looking for in the person who fills a position, does a job and becomes a member of your team. It’s about more than whether they check the right boxes. Quality of hire measures the value that new team member brings to your team, what they contribute to your culture and how much their work adds to your business’ bottom line.

How do you track and measure quality of hire?

Like any other important metric, there’s nuance to it. But quality of candidates and hires is a quantifiable metric. You can measure quality of hire by various methods, including surveys (for hiring managers, team members and the new-hire themselves), job performance ratings, how long it takes them to ramp up, time to productivity and how long they’re in the job. Each of these measures can give you a sense from managers, team members and employees how things are going. Using surveys and rating systems can help you standardize these scores.

You’ll also want to look at what sources brought you the best new hires and gain feedback from your best placements on how you can improve and continue to optimize the candidate experience.

Interested in measuring your recruiting operations and performance?

A company’s hiring processes and procedures play a significant role in its ability to attract and engage talent. Though typically unintentional, they are often set up in a way that prevents organizations from reaching their full recruiting potential. An internal recruitment scorecard becomes an indispensable tool.

Learn how to design your recruitment scorecard.

5 Approaches to Hiring High-Quality Employees

It is time to remove the worry from the hiring process for you and your dedicated HR team. Here are five strategies to help with how to recruit employees effectively to keep them happy and on board for the long term.

1. Provide a thorough job description of the position before hiring an employee.

After meeting with your hiring team and the respective hiring manager, construct a clear and detailed description of the position to offer candidates. Together, staff should perform a job analysis that allows you to collect and effectively organize information about the duties, needed skills, expected outcomes, and work environment of a particular job within your organization.

This information allows you to develop a strong job description that provides prospective hires with all the information they need, helping to eliminate possible misinterpretations about the nature of the job. Your business is then left with only the most appropriate candidates for a given position.

2. Develop strong employee recruitment strategies for each candidate search

Gather your hiring team. Using your detailed job description as a key tool in the process, set up an employee recruiting planning meeting, which includes managers, supervisors, and team members who are involved with the hiring of the new employee. This step requires further discussion of the job description, as well as hard and soft traits desired in prospective employees.

For example, is an advanced degree desired or required? Are you allowed to expand the search out of town or state, if necessary? Setting these types of parameters of your search early will help simplify the process. You can reduce the need for future meetings and extensive communication among multiple team members.

3. Develop a plan for meet-and-greets with each strong candidate and key staff members

If corporate culture is a crucial consideration in your organization, arrange some sort of meet-and-greet for candidates with managers and employees within the prospective department. Here, you can see potential hires with their guards down, interacting in an environment that may more closely resemble their daily work life, once hired.

You instantly gain understanding into candidates’ personality and a more genuine preview of their character, working knowledge, communication skills, and level of overall interest in the position — as well as how they connect with potential co-workers.

4. Review each job candidate’s social media pages for insightful information

Smart candidates will likely do some cleanup to their various social media pages during a job search. However, you can still discover all kinds of important information about prospective hires. Take the time to review social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for information as basic as how well they communicate simple ideas. You can learn about the quality of their grammar skills, critical thinking, and means of expressing personal ideas and differences of opinion with respect and courtesy.

5. Attend meetups and networking events (in addition to job fairs)

Many times, job fairs are industry-based. You might go head to head with your immediate competitors for today’s top talent for crucial roles you need to fill on a large scale. Investigate local events that aren’t traditionally recruiting-oriented to tap into new talent in your organization’s area. Search forums such as Meetup, or even Facebook, to find group events that may be well-attended by people qualified for and interested in your open position.

Remove Some Pressure by Relying on Our Employee Recruitment Strategies

If you still require additional information and ideas about how to recruit employees effectively, a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firm may be just what your business needs. 

Advanced RPO has the resources and specialization to offer you a streamlined hiring process and a huge list of employee recruitment strategies that work. Our experienced professional recruiting team can help ease your hiring burdens by performing a combination of fundamental and creative tasks to find the right candidate every time.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solutions from Advanced RPO can help you evaluate and improve your hiring processes to get the talent you need to succeed. Contact us today to learn more about our high-touch solutions.