A recent study by ATS Vendor Jobvite reveals that correct quality of hire metrics are the most important metrics for recruiters today. A full 31% identified correct quality of hire metrics as a top performance indicator, followed by retention rate at 23%, time to hire at 21% with cost per hire bringing up the rear at 7%.
Right off the bat, retention rate should be a part of all correct quality of hire metrics. So combining the two would put quality of hire would actually include more than 50% of all respondents top metrics.
So what are typical quality of hire metrics? Generally, quality of hire metrics consist of the following metrics rolled up into an an overall index:
- First year retention rate
- First year performance against the goals and competencies of the role
- Hiring manager satisfaction
- Time to productivity
- Employee engagement
With that in mind, my question is: Why would anyone name anything but quality of hire as a top recruiting metric? Isn’t quality of hire pretty much a mic drop for recruiting effectiveness?
I get it. You could have impeccable quality of hire and if your time to hire is 18 months, we’ve got a problem. But that still doesn’t negate the fact that the overall strategic value of the recruiting function is overwhelmingly reflected in quality of hire.
I suspect that the recruiters who didn’t choose quality of hire as the top metric did so simply because they don’t have the capability to measure it consistently and reliably.
Hiring Managers and Correct Quality of Hire Metrics
That’s where hiring managers come in. For correct quality of hire metrics, you need to get retention data from your payroll/HRMS system, engagement and satisfaction data from surveys, and performance data from a performance management system. Then you need to bring them all together into both individual reports for each hire and roll them up into an overall quality of hire metric for the entire organization.
Whether that’s done manually or it is accomplished by combining disparate data stores into some sort of report, it’s difficult and time consuming. This is where hiring managers become your friend and save you from the data crunch difficulty typically associated with quality of hire metrics. All it takes is a fresh approach to simplify the process, automate data collection and hold hiring managers accountable for their performance.
This new simplified model leverages hiring managers almost exclusively to report quality of hire metrics. For example:
- First year retention rate. Hiring managers know whether the employee is indeed still an employee.
- First year performance against the goals and competencies of the role. Hiring managers can bottom line the employee’s performance in the first year without an exhaustive review. They can save the formal review for the normal performance management cycle
- Hiring manager satisfaction. Hey, who knows this better than the hiring manager
- Time to productivity. Again, the hiring manager is in the best position to report this
- Employee engagement. The hiring manager and the employee can contribute to this metric
In some cases, the main hiring manager may not be the direct supervisor or the reporting structure changes during the year. In this case, data can be collected from the current manager/supervisor.
A New Model for Simplifying Metrics
In this new model, as a recruiter marks a candidate as hired in the ATS, a sequence of surveys is automatically triggered via email, text or your favorite employee communication platform like Slack. These short pulse surveys are sent to the hiring manager and the new employee at specified intervals (30, 90 180 and 365 days, for example).
These quick pulse surveys gather retention rate, performance, time to productivity and hiring manager satisfaction from the hiring manager. They also gather performance, engagement and hiring manager satisfaction data from the employee’s perspective.
All of that data goes into an analytics dashboard that updates in real time as current quality of hire metrics come in for all hires during the course of the year. And the process runs automatically in the background as recruiters work with candidates and hiring managers from application through first year of employment.
I know what you’re saying: How is an automated feedback system that continually processes huge amounts of quality of hire data from multiple different sources easier than periodically pulling reports from multiple systems?
In fact it’s easy and the most effective (and really only) platform that supports this kind of approach at the moment, Survale, is purpose-built for doing just that and much more.
You’re also probably saying “how can I get hiring managers to respond to pulse feedback when we’re lucky to get them to review the resumes we continually send them?”
That involves Survale, too. And it also involves a process that holds hiring managers accountable for their performance in all aspects of hiring. It’s the subject of my next article. Stay tuned.
