It’s difficult to measure quality of hire, particularly if your organisation is not already tracking certain relevant metrics. The problem is largely to do with how to measure something that can actually be subjective. However, there are some metrics you can look at which will help to form a good picture of what your quality of hire level might be. Here are the things that you need to look at.
Retention rates
Does your business have a high turnover of staff? Are you losing people as quickly as you are able to bring them in? If so, it could be that your hiring process is flawed, and that you are picking up the wrong people for the jobs available. There can be many factors causing a low retention rate. You may be hiring young staff members who return to school or move into a different career path after joining you, or you could be taking on people who expect more from their role, thus leaving them dissatisfied. You can measure this with exit surveys: ask employees why they are leaving your company.
Onboarding
Do your new hires tend to complete the full onboarding process within the expected amount of time? An employee who completes it slowly may be less experienced than you need them to be, and if new hires aren’t making it through the onboarding before they leave, you could be advertising the job in a misleading way. This will lead to low satisfaction and can increase the turnover rate even further.
Productivity
How productive are your new hires? You can measure the amount of goals that they manage to complete in a timely fashion, or the amount of revenue that they bring in. How long does it take them to reach that full level of productivity that you expect? If they are up to scratch very quickly and even start beating their goals, then you have a very high quality hire. If the opposite is true, then your quality of hire is low.
Manager reports
Make sure that you get reports directly from the manager of the new hire. Ask them to fill in a survey about the productivity of the employee, as well as how they fit in to the company in a cultural sense. You can also ask the manager whether they would rehire the employee after a trial period. Having a trial period in place allows you to assess your quality of hire more thoroughly, and can actually help to increase the quality by showing you what mistakes to avoid in the future. If the manager makes a glowing report, then your quality of hire is good.
Pre-hire tests
Finally, there is also a way to test your quality of hire before you commit to anything. Introduce a round of pre-hire tests, which are only to be completed by candidates that you are serious about employing. This should be the last hurdle before you actually offer them a contract. If the results of the test are good, then your instincts are most likely correct and they are the right person for the job. Not only does this test the quality of your hire process to that point, but it will also increase your quality of hire overall, by offering one final opportunity to weed out any candidates that don’t quite make the grade.
By looking at all of these metrics together, you can take the more subjective data and use it in an objective way, assessing the quality of hire from the resulting figures. This will help you to improve across the board.
Layla Fenston is a writer behind eVoice Australia - a premier provider of virtual telecommunications solutions in Australia. Passionate about helping others achieve success in their careers, Layla regularly writes about small business and entrepreneurship.
