Why Hasn’t IT Been Measured

While everyone agrees that new hire quality is important, many in HR question whether it can be measured. They are unequivocally wrong. New hire quality can be measured and any recruiting operation that is not doing so is inadequate at best. That said, it is important to understand why we haven’t been measuring it. We’re all professionals doing incredibly hard and complicated work that demands more, better, faster, and often with fewer resources. Metrics haven’t been part and parcel of our work because there haven’t been well founded and accepted standards regarding what we should measure or what the associated formulations should be. Collecting data is problematic and if we have the data, how are the results reported—what, when, and to whom? Consultants have also exacerbated the measurement of HR metrics. By definition, consultants are proprietary, and proprietary means they have to be different. So every consultant has different metrics to espouse. You can’t and shouldn’t embrace them all—what is a recruiter to do?

Quality is a particularly difficult metric because you have to decide when to take the measure and to differentiate impact of hires from employees in the existing work unit.

This further complication in measuring quality is the result of trying to assess the cause of quality performance. For example, is quality performance determined by the personal attributes of the individual or by environmental factors in the workplace? If the answer is both, then what are the relative contributions of each? The environmental factors in the workplace are clearly beyond the control of staffing operations, but they always make an impact, fairly or unfairly, on the perception of staffing’s ability to deliver New Hire Quality.

There are two elements to evaluating new hire quality: What is it and when do you measure it?

What is it? The customer is the ultimate arbiter of any definition of quality and this includes new hires. Most of us have learned that the “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to interviewing is ineffective and that clear requirements should be established before starting to source candidates. Defining new hire quality is just an extension of good recruiting practices. In addition to candidate criteria, initial on the job performance standards should also be established before recruiting is initiated.

These standards should focus on the first outcomes or contributions associated with the position and provide the basis for determining the quality of the new hire. For a new pharmaceutical sales rep, the number of calls, physician feedback, and sales may define quality. We’d suggest that the quality of a newly hired recruiter be based on his or her initial efficiency, customer satisfaction, time, and the quality of hires.

Some organizations use the first performance appraisal to measure new hire quality. This can be effective if the organization recognizes that the results are to be used for two separate purposes. One is to measure the quality of the recruiting and drive continuous recruiting performance improvement. The other is to measure and develop the new employee’s performance.

When to measure? If new hire quality is defined by initial performance outcomes, it can’t be measured the first day and rarely the first week. When to measure is as important as the definition of new hire quality because it represents when the hiring manager expects the new employee to first start contributing. This time-to-contribute should also be established before recruiting is initiated, and it should be subsequent to the euphoria of the new hire honeymoon and before the organizational influence prevails.

Most of us have seen stellar new hires fail under bad managers or in bad organizations. That isn’t necessarily the recruiter’s fault. New hire quality should be based on the new hire’s initial performance, not organization dynamics. In order to most accurately measure the quality of the new hire, the evaluation should take place before the organizational influences can overshadow the employee.

The quality of a new clerk can probably be ascertained within two to four weeks. However, it may take as much as a year to fairly evaluate the new hire quality of a regional marketing director or research scientist.

As with all other valid metrics, a quality measurement fosters high performance. Establishing both the initial performance standards and when those contributions are expected before starting to recruit fosters better recruiting performance.