Getting Started
Next to measuring, consulting skills are the most important recruiting and HR expertise. Good consulting skills will enable you to get the customer to help you to help them.
Like customer satisfaction, the new hire quality metric cannot be defined by a specific formula. Instead, it should be defined mutually by both staffing and business stakeholders. Use consulting skills to contract and work with the hiring manager to define quality and when it is to be measured. Quality is the first and most important staffing metric, and as such should be first defined at the very beginning of the recruiting process. Begin with the end in mind: “How does the hiring manager want the candidate to be performing at a predetermined point in time?” New hire quality and when the measure is to be taken must be determined before recruiting is initiated.
One way to assess New Hire Quality is by tracking:
Formal performance ratings of new hires: Is the performance of new hires consistent with the specifications used to make the hire?
Retention rate of highly rated new hires: Are the new hires arriving with a high profile and great expectations about their impact if they stay long enough to fulfill their promise?
Sources of retained highly-rated new hires: Where are these hires coming from?
You might also gather other information, since the process for assessing the quality of staffing operations is not formulaic. If you track the data we suggest above, you will be able to determine:
Whether your operations align with your business as evidenced by the success of your hires when they are actually on the job.
Whether you are producing highly rated hires who are truly prepared to have the impact on the business that they are expected to have (that is, are you hiring people who have the qualifications necessary to be successful in your system, or are you simply matching resume entries with job specifications?).
Often it is easier to initiate a metric if you assess prior performance. A simple associated strategy would be to ask hiring managers to review the criteria established prior to hiring and rate the new employee(s) today on a scale from 1 to 5. Possible criteria include:
Goals.
System compatibility.
Capacity.
Motivation.
Knowledge and skills.
Performance.
Experience.
Customer compatibility.
Work group compatibility.
Organization compatibility.
Change/learning posture.
Development areas.
Another approach is to ask the hiring manager to review each expectation listed and, on a scale of 1 to 5, assess how close the new hires came to meeting each expectation. Then the hiring manager can use these numbers to select a number, which reflects the overall quality of the new hires.
Whether or not you start measuring new hire quality by measuring prior recruiting activity, the most accurate measures require that new hire quality and the time to measure be established before recruiting is initiated.