The Need to Prioritise Quality of Hire

In today's landscape it is more important than ever for businesses to get it right when hiring team members. Good hiring decisions can reduce costs, improve employee retention, and create a better work environment. By continuously measuring quality of hire (QoH) metrics, you can keep a pulse on the health of your employee base and restructure your recruiting process as needed.  

From ‘Great Resignation’ to hiring during a recession

Competition in the labour market reached extreme levels in 2021/2022. The phenomenon became known as ‘The Great Resignation’, and businesses globally were affected. And yet, we are up against an almost completely different landscape in 2023. With a recession either looming or having already begun, the story has changed dramatically. Now, businesses are grappling with a slowing economy and the tough strategic decisions it entails. 

As hiring budgets shrink in real terms or remain subject to constant change, executive, people and talent teams need to find innovative ways to attract and retain new hires. Specifically, this means a comprehensive plan to foster resilience in their organisations via a long-term strategic outlook and software-enabled hiring analytics.

‘Business leaders are facing scrutiny as mass layoffs reach headlines. The move to responsible growth is as much about respecting the investment that employees make in you as it is protecting the long-term reputation of the business.’ - Anton Boner, Screenloop Co-Founder and Commercial Director

Reimagining the approach to recruitment

Traditional recruiting metrics are being re-evaluated because they have a poor correlation to quality. While some like ‘time to hire’ is still important, senior business leaders are reflecting on the last two years and recognising the need for change. Namely, where hiring budgets are maximised to find the best possible hire (rather than the quickest or cheapest candidate), and redundancies are minimised.

As the current economic uncertainty rages on, hiring the right talent for your team is more essential than ever. Senior leaders and hiring teams must re-examine their approach to talent acquisition and begin focusing on employees’ business impact over other metrics via Quality of Hire measurements. This approach can help you streamline the recruitment process and identify ideal candidates based on a scalable framework of success attributes. 

So, what is quality of hire?

Quality of hire a holistic performance measurement that takes into account the long-term business impact of new hires. Unlike traditional KPIs like time to hire and cost per hire, QoH focuses on what matters most to businesses when hiring: returns on their investment in people. 

More specifically, Quality of hire is a metric used to measure the value that an employee brings to a company over time. It takes into account both tangible factors such as job performance and intangible factors such as employee performance, team fit and cultural match. Quality of hire will help you identify which previous or current employees have the most impact on your organisation in terms of success and longevity. By analysing data from past hires—such as job performance reviews or exit interviews—you can identify patterns that indicate which traits make someone an ideal candidate for a particular role within your organisation. And then you can recruit candidates with similar attributes or 'quality markers' more effectively in the future.

A good quality of hire can increase employee retention, reduce costs associated with bad hires, and create a better work environment. When employees feel valued and supported by their employer, they are more likely to stay with the organisation for longer—saving money on recruitment fees, onboarding processes, and lost productivity due to staff turnover. Additionally, good QoH can lead to improved working relationships between team members which can improve morale throughout the organisation.

It’s for this reason that QoH was identified as the most important hiring metric in LinkedIn’s 2019 The Future of Recruiting report. Described as ‘the holy grail’ of recruitment, it’s been widely adopted by leading HR professionals for its ability to evidence employee impact and empower businesses to take a more strategic approach to talent acquisition.

How data-driven solutions can help

The current market volatility has put a strain on businesses to do more with less. By automating and standardising quality of hire initiatives, people and business leaders can focus on other aspects of talent management, like employee training, cultural initiatives and long-term business needs. Fortunately, modern talent operation solutions now makes objective QoH measurements a reality, by mapping the connection between a candidate's hiring process, their candidacy, and their wider business impact for little effort from talent teams.

Leading talent operations software offers even deeper insights into your organisation. This can include how your QoH score compares between teams or with other firms in your industry. By benchmarking recruitment data against department or industry standards, you can compare how your organisation’s hiring practices stack up against teams or competitors. As a result, hiring teams and senior business leaders can develop new strategies to fine-tune their talent acquisition and minimise the cost of bad hires. 

If you're looking for a way to ensure that you are hiring the best talent for your business, our quality of hire solution may just be what you need. With advanced analytics, benchmarking capabilities and automated processes, we can help you make better hiring decisions and measure the impact of those decisions on your organisation. From optimising candidate selection, creating effective onboarding programs, to tracking long-term performance, our solution provides valuable insights that will help you maximise the effectiveness of your recruitment process.

Conclusion

When it comes to hiring top talent for your organisation, measuring quality of hire is essential for ensuring long-term success and stability within the company. By tracking external and internal metrics over time and using this data to refine their recruitment processes accordingly, organisations can ensure that their hiring practices remain competitive in order to attract the best possible candidates for each position available. Ultimately, this will result in fewer turnovers, higher productivity levels amongst staff members, better culture alignment between individuals within teams or departments—which translates into greater overall success for the company overall. Schedule a demo today and let us show you how our quality of hire solution can take your recruitment strategy to the next level!

‍