Quality of Hire is A Myth

This month’s issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence magazine is all about quality of hire, which makes sense, considering that so many recruiters continually rank this as the single most important metric driving relative recruiting success. 

While this magazine contains insights and expertise from some of the world’s top experts in talent acquisition today on how to measure, manage and optimize for “quality of hire,” the truth of the matter is that, despite this term having become entrenched as a ubiquitous part of recruiting and hiring, no one has ever truly figured out how quality of hire is actually calculated. 

There are quite a few theories out there, and most of them boil down to what amounts to little more than common sense. Yeah - making sure the candidate checks out on social media and doesn’t have anything too dirty in their digital footprint is probably going to improve quality. 

And OK - psychometric or skills-based pre-hire assessments do a fairly effective job of ensuring that candidates can not only do the job they’re being hired for, but also, that they’re going to effectively align with the bigger business and company culture. So too does structured interviewing, background and digital verification checking and all the other quality controls we already have in place for quality of hire. 

The thing is, though, because the concept of quality is subjective (and amorphous), there’s no shared ontology, no common definition, for what seems to be a simple and straightforward term. Everyone defines quality differently, making quality of hire more of a matter of perception than a meaningful recruiting metric - if you can’t agree on what you’re measuring, then there’s no point in doing that measurement whatsoever. 

That, of course, doesn’t stop talent acquisition professionals and recruiting leaders from trying. But these efforts will continue to be Quioxtian, at best - but more likely, continue to represent a significant waste of time and resources. 

TA organizations spend literally billions of dollars a year trying to make sure that every new hire is going to work out, but the truth of the matter is, voluntary turnover has remained largely consistent across industries for exempt or executive-level roles.

1 in 3 management hires leave the organization before their first anniversary, an average that’s barely moved in a decade or so. Another ⅓ of those hires who do stay (so we’re talking about only 33% of new leadership hires who are actually happy when they hit their first work anniversary) report regretting their decision to accept their current role. 

The reasons they leave, or are so quickly disengaged, of course, are manifold. But since recruiters widely consider both disengagement and turnover to be perhaps the biggest factors factoring into the nebulous concept of “quality of hire,” then we have to ask ourselves where the impetus of quality of hire falls, and whether or not it’s even worth thinking about, much less measuring or trying to quantify as an actionable analytic. We have a 67% failure rate as recruiters in making sure our candidates are satisfied with their new roles, feel like they fit in, or are willing to stick around for the long haul. Those are much easier outcomes, of course, to solve for (and measure for) than the quality of hire.

Employee engagement is easily measured against a common standard. So, too, is voluntary turnover, net employee retention and related indicators such as referral volume or absenteeism. And if we can make a positive impact on that data, well, it’s pretty safe to guess that quality of hiring will noticeably increase, too. 

Even if you can’t actually measure it. Enjoy this month’s magazine, and happy hunting.