A recent study by ATS vendor Jobvite found that quality of hire metrics are now the most important performance indicators for recruiters. A full 31% of recruiters named quality of hire assessment as their top metric, followed by first-year retention rates at 23%, time to hire at 21%, and cost per hire trailing behind at 7%.
Let’s be clear: retention rate is one of the core quality of hire metrics, so combining the two puts quality of hire at the center of over 50% of all recruiting performance priorities.
So, what goes into typical quality of hire surveys? Most commonly, they include:
- First-year retention
- First-year performance against job goals and competencies
- Hiring manager satisfaction
- Time to productivity
- Employee engagement
When you look at it this way, it’s hard to understand why any recruiter wouldn’t prioritize quality of hire as their main recruitment effectiveness indicator. It reflects real business outcomes. Sure, if your time to hire is 18 months, that’s a problem. But quality of hire tells the full story of recruiting value in one metric.
So, why don’t more recruiters use it? Probably because many don’t have the tools to measure it consistently—or easily.
Hiring Managers Are Key to Measuring Quality of Hire
Measuring quality of hire usually means combining data from your ATS, HRIS, survey tools, and performance management system. You need retention data, employee performance evaluation results, and survey feedback on engagement and satisfaction.
It’s no surprise that building that report manually is time-consuming. That’s why hiring managers are key to simplifying this process.
A modern, streamlined approach uses hiring managers directly as the main source for quality of hire metrics, and here’s how:
- Retention: The hiring manager knows if the employee is still there.
- Performance: Managers can give a top-level performance review without waiting for the full annual cycle.
- Satisfaction: No one is better positioned to rate satisfaction than the hiring manager.
- Time to productivity: Managers know when a new hire started adding value.
- Engagement: Can be measured from both the hiring manager and the employee.
Even if a reporting line changes, you can still gather data from the current supervisor.
A Smarter Model for Quality of Hire Assessment
Here’s what this data-driven recruitment model looks like:
Once a recruiter marks a candidate as “hired” in the ATS, a sequence of quality of hire survey questions is triggered automatically. These are sent at specific intervals—like 30, 90, 180, and 365 days post-hire—to both the hiring manager and the employee.
These short, targeted quality of hire surveys collect:
- Retention, productivity, and satisfaction data from the manager
- Engagement, manager satisfaction, and job fit feedback from the employee
All this feeds into a real-time analytics dashboard, constantly updating your talent acquisition metrics with accurate, ongoing data for every new hire throughout the year.
The system runs in the background while recruiters continue sourcing, screening, and hiring—making it one of the most powerful hiring success factors you can implement.
Yes, It’s Easier Than Pulling Reports
You might be asking:
“How is setting up automated feedback and analytics easier than just pulling a few reports manually?”
The answer? It’s much easier—especially with tools like Survale, which is built specifically for this kind of continuous, real-time recruitment ROI analysis. No manual data crunching. No stitching reports from five different systems. Just clean, live metrics that show how your hiring is actually performing.
You might also be thinking:
“How do we get hiring managers to respond? We can barely get them to review resumes.”
That’s a fair question—and one that’s covered in the next article. But it starts with making performance-based hiring part of the manager’s responsibility and holding them accountable for their role in the hiring process.
FAQs
How to measure quality of hire metrics?
Quality of hire is measured by combining several metrics: first-year retention, employee performance, hiring manager satisfaction, time to productivity, and employee engagement. These can be gathered through integrated systems or with short pulse surveys at key post-hire milestones.
What are the 3 Ps of recruitment?
The 3 Ps usually refer to:
- People – the candidates and recruiters involved
- Process – how hiring is structured and executed
- Performance – outcomes like quality of hire and new hire success
These guide the core of effective hiring process optimization.
How do you measure success in hiring?
Success in hiring is measured using recruitment effectiveness indicators like:
- Time to hire
- Cost per hire
- Quality of hire
- Candidate satisfaction
- Hiring manager feedback
- New hire retention and performance
What are hiring KPIs?
Hiring KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) include:
- Time to fill
- Offer acceptance rate
- First-year retention
- Candidate experience scores
- Quality of hire metrics
These give a snapshot of how well your hiring process is performing.
