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Building a dynamic, productive team starts at the hiring process. That makes fine-tuning your recruiting procedures a key to long-term success. But what metrics should you use? How should you go about measuring the quality of hires you get from your recruiting efforts?

These questions may seem like they have simple answers. If you get a good employee, you did a good job. If you get a bad employee, you did a bad job. Couldn’t be more straightforward, right?

Well, not quite.

One good or bad outcome doesn’t prove the quality of a procedure. Even the most rigorous recruiting structures make mistakes at a surprisingly high rate. One study found that 46% of new hires failed within the first year and a half. That figure suggests that the typical hiring process is basically a coin flip.

More than that, holding a strictly binary view of the situation doesn’t leave much room for small improvements. For that, you need a more refined method. Here are a few ways of looking at your hiring process and effectively measuring the outcomes:

Time Horizon

First off, it’s important to realize that the concept of “quality of hire” can have multiple definitions. In large part, these rely on the time horizon you use to judge the process.

Short Term

You can look at the quality of your recruiting process immediately after making your decision. Of course, at this point, you don’t have much information about your new employee. Still, there are a few data points you can look at.

  • Time-to-hire: How long did it take you to run the process? Compare your results to industry norms and see if there is room to improve efficiency.
  • Cost of hiring: What kind of investment was necessary to find your new worker? Again, rate your results against an appropriate benchmark to see if you might need to streamline your process.
  • Training Time: How long did it take your new hire to get up to speed? In the early going, this will be your only guide to employee quality. It will provide an indicator as to how well your recruiting efforts did.

Long Term

Don’t just look at the short-term results of your recruiting process. Take a long view as well. Routinely review your current staff and compare them to the hiring process that led you to employ them. Here are a few criteria to keep in mind:

  • Employee Contribution: Once they become productive employees, how well do your hires perform on the job? Use your performance KPIs to quantitatively assess how much your workers have contributed over time.
  • Team Dynamics: How well do your workers fit into the team? Hiring is more than just finding great individual performers. You are building a team. You need to gauge how well your recruiting efforts identify soft skills, like communication and leadership.
  • Cultural Fit: How well do your hires fit into your corporate culture? This plays a large role in how well they fit into your plans long term.

Ways to Measure Quality of Hire

It’s one thing to say “measure your employees’ contributions.” It’s another to devise an effective method of doing that. If your process of evaluation isn’t sound, you can’t effectively judge your hiring procedures. Here are a few factors to keep in mind:

Employee Performance

Of course, this is the core question: how do the people you hire do the job? Having well-defined key performance indicators allows you to rate performance accurately. This data, in turn, lets you judge how well you did during the initial hiring stage.

Looking long term, many firms use a metric known as Employee Lifetime Value or ELV. This gives a look at how much a worker contributed during their tenure at the firm. It acts as a kind of all-in-one measure of value0 – a crucial indicator when you’re trying to judge your hiring practices.

Retention

Having a great employee is a gift. However, it isn’t necessary a gift that keeps on giving. Top talent tends to look for the next big opportunity, making it difficult to keep your best workers in place. How well you are able to retain workers points to your ability to match candidates with positions. It also indicates your long-term attractiveness to high-value candidates.

Supervisor Satisfaction

In some ways, you can define a good worker as someone who keeps the boss happy. You can also quantify this sentiment. Ask direct supervisors their opinions about recent hires, gathering data at various stages in the onboarding, training, and working process.

Optimizing your hiring process is critical to long term success. A strong recruiting partner, like PrideStaff, can facilitate that effort.

Contact PrideStaff today to learn more.

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