How is Your Organization Measuring Quality of Hire? | Brian Heger

Talent acquisition teams rely on various metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their recruiting and hiring practices. While tactical metrics like time to hire, candidates per hire, and offer acceptance rate are commonly used for their ease of measurement, strategic metrics, such as quality of hire (QoH), are harder to measure. According to the 2024 LinkedIn Future of Recruiting report, QoH is the top priority for recruiting professionals this year. Even in LinkedIn’s 2020 report, QoH had the most significant gap between its importance and current use among eight key recruiting metrics. The 2024 report suggests redefining QoH by considering factors like job performance, team fit, culture alignment, productivity, and retention. However, a few of these metrics often rely heavily on hiring managers’ perceptions, which typically focus on an employee’s near-term performance. Given the rapidly changing skills landscape and the growing emphasis on long-term internal mobility, I recommend incorporating longer-term QoH measures, such as evaluating an employee’s potential for future roles and the development of skills critical to the organization’s future. Adopting this broader perspective on QoH requires moving beyond hiring managers’ viewpoints and integrating diverse sources of talent data throughout an employee’s tenure. Has your organization defined QoH, identified the most valid and reliable data sources to measure it, and determined whether QoH is even a useful metric? This could be a good topic of discussion for talent acquisition teams.