You’ve heard it before, but how can Quality of Hire really transform your organisation’s talent acquisition processes and performance?
LinkedIn believes that Quality of Hire is the ‘magic metric’. Industry frontrunners like Lou Adler say that if you’re not measuring it, you’re not hiring the best people. Now, that all sounds great, but what does Quality of Hire actually mean, and what exactly could it do for your organisation?
What is Quality of Hire?
We can split the metric into two components:
- The quality of the candidates being processed and subsequently hired
- The quality of the overall hiring process
The first is concerned with the candidate pipeline and retention. How closely do the candidates you’re seeing align with your ideal hire? Once they’re in the job, how are they performing against expectations, and how long have they stayed?
The second looks at the internal factors. Timescales, hiring procedures and stakeholder feedback are all assessed to provide a measurement of how well the whole process has performed based on your organisation’s needs.
What can measuring Quality of Hire do for me?
It’ll boost your choice of candidates
The idea here isn’t to give you a longer list of candidates to choose from; it’s to provide a stronger shortlist of candidates who all fit the bill more closely. In other words, it prioritises quality over quantity. By conducting more effective pre-hire screening and measurement, the quality of shortlists rises, meaning you’re far less likely to end up hiring the one candidate who’s merely ‘good enough’.
It’ll improve your candidate experience
78% of candidates think that candidate experience demonstrates how highly a company values its people, and 80–90% say candidate experience can make them change their minds about a role. No one likes to have their time wasted, and so more effective alignment between candidate and company requirements means that only those candidates with a strong chance of success will be shortlisted.
It’ll enhance your productivity
Ensuring you get the right candidate in the right job isn’t just good for morale – it’s the first step in achieving more from your talent. Quality of Hire measures how well new employees are achieving objectives and how they’re performing against expectations. Not only does this allow the identification of ‘superstars’ who will rise quickly, it also facilitates the comparison of other employees doing the same job. This means more performance transparency, and fewer passengers.
It’ll increase your retention
Post-hire candidate quality allows you to understand how many staff leave the company, and, crucially, why they left. Acting on any emerging pain points will empower you to continually improve workplace culture, and thus increase retention rates. Statistics show that employees who are engaged and happy at work are 59% less likely to look for a different job in the next 12 months.
It’ll revamp your employer brand
If your reputation as an employer is excellent, top talent will want to work with you. In fact, LinkedIn found that a great employer brand results in 50% more qualified applicants. The same study found that nearly one third of employers use Quality of Hire to measure employer brand ROI. The insights Quality of Hire provides means that you will not only be able to improve on any internal issues, you’ll also be able to benchmark against competitors’ performances too.
