How to Make Measuring Quality of Hire Easier

Measuring quality of hire (QoH) is a critical part of ensuring an organization’s long-term success. Having the right people in the right roles helps businesses consistently meet goals and prevent workplace misconduct.

With 75% of employers reporting difficulty in filling roles, along with companies in the 1,000-4,999 total employees bracket having the most difficulty, talent acquisition is an enormous challenge. While improving the candidate experience and leveraging signing bonuses can help to attract more talent, acquisition specialists need to ensure that they have ready access to the right talent when they need it.

A recruiter or hiring manager might be tasked with filling an empty role, but a talent acquisition specialist works to find and secure top-quality talent before the organization needs it. It’s a much more proactive approach to recruitment that necessitates measuring the quality of candidates well before they enter the organization.

But, how can you make assessing the quality of a candidate for a position easier? What technologies and techniques can help you identify those ideal candidates who will provide value to your organization and avoid the repercussions of a poor-fit acquisition?

One key tool for measuring quality of hire for organizations moving forward into the future will be online screening.

What Is Online Screening?

Online screening is the practice of searching for online and social media site content posted by and concerning potential job candidates to identify potential quality of hire red flags (or “green” flags).

However, it’s more than just scouring a candidate’s online profiles. Online screening reports insights on risks and rewards of adding a candidate to your organization.

How Do You Measure Quality of Hire?

How do you currently measure quality of hire? For many, measuring quality of hire is a process that takes place well after a candidate has joined an organization. Some metrics used to establish the quality of a hire post-hoc include:

Employee Retention Rates. High turnover rates can be an indicator of poor hire quality in an organization. This generally serves as a late warning sign of low-quality hires as poor-fit candidates leave the organization unless you do a deep dive into specific teams to see if turnover suddenly spikes after the addition of a new hire.
New Hire Productivity. The overall productivity of newly-acquired talent is another common way to measure the value that they bring to an organization.
Peer Assessments and Performance Reviews. One way to track how well new talent is meshing with their team and your overall corporate culture is through peer assessments—such as the ones performed during periodic employee performance reviews. Are employees complaining about a new hire’s behavior? Are they providing positive feedback about a new talent’s actions and performance? These peer assessments can give you insights into the employee’s fit within your organization.
Job Offer Acceptance Rates. Of the candidates your organization offers a position to, how many accept it? What reasons do they give for turning the offer down? A poor-fit candidate may refuse a job offer. Knowing your job offer acceptance rate and the reasons behind refusals can help you identify issues with the talent acquisition process and make corrections so you can focus on higher-quality candidates who are a better fit for your organization.

The issue with measuring quality of hire in this way is that it isn’t proactive enough for talent acquisition. It’s a better fit for hiring managers or recruiters who are looking to fill positions short-term. Most of this information only reveals problems after the fact—making it more difficult to avoid taking on poor-fit candidates and preventing issues caused by low-quality hires.

How to Make Measuring Quality of Hire Easier and More Proactive

How can you make measuring quality of hire both easier and more proactive so that it has more value for talent acquisition? To improve quality of hire assessments and make them more proactive, companies are turning to online screening solutions.

By leveraging online screening, talent acquisition leaders can find out more about the candidates they’re considering for future roles in their organization before adding them to the talent acquisition funnel.

For example, say that a candidate has a social media profile where they’ve shared a manifesto indicating a high risk of violent behavior. That’s a clear red flag indicating that the candidate is someone who shouldn’t be in your talent acquisition pipeline.

How Using a Screening Solution Improves Online Screening

The challenge with online and social media screening is that it often means finding more than just red flags. It can convey protected information about a recruit that could compromise the objectivity of talent acquisition specialists who see it. Even if the specialist goes into the analysis with a mindset of being as fair and objective as possible, it’s best to avoid even the perception of impropriety.

This is why having online and social media screening solutions delivered through a third-party provider can be useful. A third, unaffiliated party can perform an unbiased analysis, scrub out any protected information, and forward objective data and reports to talent acquisition specialists.

This helps to remove bias and ensure that staffing decisions are based on objective data instead of any individual’s personal preferences. It also helps to keep a company’s hiring practices compliant with regulatory requirements and reduce potential risks.

Benefits of Measuring the Quality of New Hires

So, aside from avoiding the consequences of adding poor-fit candidates to your organization, why is measuring quality of hire a good thing for your business? Some of the potential benefits of tracking your overall candidate quality include:

Helping Improve the Corporate Culture. When you add motivated and dedicated people who mesh well with your organization’s values, you create an opportunity to improve your company culture. This can be invaluable for driving employee retention and productivity long-term.
Using Historic Data to Drive Future Hiring Decisions. By measuring QoH, you can find what your high-quality hires have in common that make them such a good fit—and use that to find top-tier talent moving forward. You might even use this information to proactively connect with ideal job candidates who aren’t currently looking for a new employer, but may be amenable to a career change in the future. Also, you can look at common elements among the poor fits and use that to screen future candidates.
Weeding Out Poor Fits Earlier in the Hiring Process. The sooner a bad fit is no longer considered in the hiring process, the better. By tracking quality of hire and establishing a set of common indicators of poor fit hires, you can optimize the earliest portions of your talent acquisition strategy to filter out these bad candidates—helping to improve overall quality for the candidates.
Improving Employee Retention. When you bring in high-quality candidates, you’re more likely to see higher rates of retention among both new hires and veteran employees. Great candidates not only stay longer, they mesh well with your existing team so that others are more likely to stay as well.
Quantifying Your Talent Acquisition Results. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Moreover, your company can’t properly realize the ROI for your talent acquisition efforts if you aren’t measuring all of your metrics and providing them with those insights. Tracking your quality of hire helps you show the full impact of your talent acquisition efforts and demonstrate your value to the organization.

Do you need to start proactively measuring the quality of talent in your acquisition pipeline? Request a demo of Fama today to get started on online screening and make measuring quality of hire throughout your organization faster, easier, and more compliant.