Quality of Hire

What quality of hire means

Quality of hire (جودة التعيين) is a recruitment measure that tries to answer the question the other hiring measures leave open: was this hire a good one? It does not ask how long the hire took or how much it cost. Those are separate questions, and each of them is answered by a separate figure.

The difference lies in what is being judged. Time and cost describe the effort an organisation spent to fill a position. Quality of hire describes the outcome of filling it, judged by what happened once the new employee was in the role. A figure for effort and a figure for outcome are therefore not interchangeable, and a good result on one does not answer the question the other asks.

Why quality of hire is hard to measure

The other recruitment measures look at the process, and their result is known on the day of the hire. Time to fill, cost per hire and the number of candidates all describe the path that led to the hire, so each of them can be stated as soon as the hire is made.

Quality of hire looks at the outcome, and it is known only months later. Two of its components, set out below, are taken after a set period in the role: an appraisal at six months or at a year, or whether the first year was completed. Until that period has passed, there is no quality of hire figure to report for the hire in question.

By the time the figure exists, other factors have acted on it. The manager the new employee reports to, the onboarding the employee received, and the role itself, if it has changed since the hire, all shape the outcome. None of these belongs to the selection decision, yet each of them is reflected in the result that quality of hire records. That is the reason a measure of the outcome is harder to interpret than a measure of the process: recruitment ends with the hire, while the outcome continues to reflect what happens after it.

What quality of hire can be built from

Quality of hire is not a single observation. It can be assembled from several components, each recording a different side of how the hire turned out:

• A performance appraisal after a defined period, six months or a year. It records how the new employee’s work was rated at that point.
• Retention. It asks whether the new employee completed the first year.
• The direct manager’s assessment of how closely the new employee matches what the manager needed. It records the judgement of the person the employee reports to.
• Time to productivity. It records when the new employee began to perform the work independently.

These components are combined and weighted in different ways, so the name of the measure does not, by itself, indicate what is inside it. Two figures that are both called quality of hire can rest on different components, or on the same components with different weights. Any figure presented as “quality of hire” should therefore be questioned about its components before it is compared with anything, whether that is another organisation’s figure, another period or another team.

The error that invalidates a quality of hire reading

The error is to hold recruitment responsible for a result whose causes recruitment does not control alone. A good hire whom a poor manager places in an unclear role, with no onboarding, will show a low quality of hire, and the fault in that case does not lie in the selection.

The manager, the role and the onboarding in that case are the factors named earlier. All three come after the selection decision, and each of them can lower the result without any change in who was chosen. A low score, taken alone, therefore does not say whether the selection went wrong or whether what followed it did.

That is why quality of hire is examined alongside what happened after the hire, not in isolation from it. The measure becomes useful when the result repeats at one source or with one assessor. A single low result can reflect the conditions of one placement. A result that recurs among hires who came from the same source, or who were assessed by the same person, points back to something those hires share in the recruitment process.

What makes quality of hire usable

The purpose of quality of hire is not to pass a verdict on an individual employee but to improve the selection decision. The measure looks back at hires already made so that the next selection can be better informed.

That requires linking each result to what happened during recruitment:

• The source. It is the channel the hire came from, which is what source of hire records for each person hired.
• The interviewer. It is the person who interviewed the candidate.
• The deciding criterion. It is the criterion that tipped the decision in the candidate’s favour.

Without this link, quality of hire becomes a score with no lesson in it: a number that says how a group of hires turned out, but not why, and not what to repeat. With the link, the measure can show which source brings in people who stay, and which interview question actually predicted the outcome.

The details of the recruitment are known while the process is running, and the outcome is known months later. The two can only be matched if those details are kept with the hire’s record until the outcome is available.

Quality of hire at small hiring volumes

Quality of hire works on numbers of hires, not on the individual case. A pattern at one source or with one interviewer can only show itself across several hires, and a single result cannot separate the selection from what followed it.

An organisation that hires in small numbers each year finds in quality of hire nothing on which to base a conclusion. It can, however, review each hire individually, looking at how the person was selected and at what happened after the start date, and for that organisation such a review is more useful than a composite figure.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Cost per Hire
• Structured Interview
• Employee Onboarding
• Retention Rate
• Predictive Validity