Are You Measuring Your Quality of Hire?

Do you know if you are hiring the right people? Does striving to attract students with the highest GPA at the best schools ensure the future success of your organization? Or does it simply result in you giving your campus hires a couple of years of training before they go elsewhere? How do you know?

At the NACE conference in Orlando last month a panel of expert campus recruiters discussed the use of various metrics to evaluate and improve their recruiting. For me, what was most striking was when the facilitator, John Flato of Campus Strategic Partners, asked the audience how many of them measured “quality of hire”. There were about 75 employers in the room and yet only a handful raised their hands. I was so surprised that I posed the same question in my own workshop at the conference the next day – and the results were the same.

To be clear, “quality of hire” refers to the success of your new hires as they progress in their careers in your organization. It doesn’t mean how many other employers wanted them, how well they interviewed, or other assets they demonstrated during the recruiting process. Quality of hire measures whether or not they deliver value to your organization, get promoted, and fit well enough with your culture to want to stay long enough to deliver a great return on your investment.

Tracking cost-per-hire, time-to-hire, job offer acceptance rates, and other data helps to measure whether or not you are “filling seats” efficiently. But these metrics say nothing about whether or not you are actually hiring the right people. Without measuring the quality of hire – the true success of your process – you can’t demonstrate your effectiveness nor learn how to make improvements to your talent attraction and management.

In fact, your metrics may be entirely misleading. Perhaps you should be doubling the value you attribute to your candidates’ extra-curricular activities; perhaps those who interview well are your worst performers. How do you know?

Most employers have failed to design and implement a process to determine whether or not the students and graduates they are hiring are actually the right fit for their organization – and therefore likely to be promoted and make a meaningful impact. Many have no idea how long their new hires stay in the organization or how well they perform in the long term.

But it is quite possible that your “top picks” are failing miserably on the job, or succeeding wonderfully but leaving quickly when they find the work isn’t what they were looking for. Meanwhile, the “second tier” candidates you are hiring may be staying for the long term and excelling on the job. Obviously you’d like to re-vamp your hiring process so that those you have been considering “second tier” become identified quickly as your top candidates. You simply can’t learn this without tracking your quality of hire.

All that is really needed is a process and documentation to track your campus hires as they progress in their careers; access to their performance reviews; their exit interviews if they leave; and the original details from the hiring and interviewing process. This doesn’t have to be difficult, but it is challenging when there is high turnover in the campus recruiting roles – as is the case with many employers. There are tools such as RECSOLU that are designed for campus recruiters and some ATS systems will also facilitate the maintenance of such information.

You can always find ways to cut costs and add more efficiency to the process, but your ability to advance the role of campus recruiting in your organization; gain more resources; a commitment for more hiring; and truly add value is severely limited if you aren’t measuring your quality of hire.