Quality of Hire = Sasquatch

Would you hire this guy?

It’s no surprise to learn that today’s corporate recruiters are measured most by the quality of hires they bring into an organization. Developing a strong talent pool to source this quality is also high on the list, as evidenced by some of the numbers in our just-released Talent Acquisition Survey.

Ok, so we know that quality reigns supreme and that a recruiter’s professional success is directly tied to the ultimate performance of the hires they bring in. That’s the measuring stick. That’s how a recruiter proves his or her worth -- find and hire top talent. Simple. Done and done. Right?

Wrong. Who are we kidding? Of course it’s not that simple. The QofH metric has been the sasquatch of the recruiting game for as long as any of us can remember. Ever elusive, almost to mythical proportions.

The Jibe survey once again showed this to be true, revealing that 6 in 10 recruiters believe QofH is the best way to evaluate recruiting success, but that measuring QofH remains one of their top challenges. Only 25% of our survey respondents said they are able to track QofH with their current tools.

Clearly, we have a problem. The metric identified as the most important to evaluate success is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to capture. It would be like the owner or manager of a baseball team saying he’s going to offer a contract extension to the player with the highest batting average, then throwing up his hands and saying they don’t keep track of that statistic, so sorry, no one is getting an extension. Doesn’t make much sense.

So what can we do about it? Kris Dunn over at the HR Capitalist took a look at this last week, offering a simple way to at least begin to measure QofH. He readily admits in the comments that it’s a very basic beginning point for this measurement, but at least it’s a beginning point. According to our research, a majority of organizations haven’t even gone that far.

Identifying your organization’s own definition of QofH is crucial, as is communication between hiring managers and recruiters to ensure everyone is working off the same page. As a recruiting technology vendor, we don’t pretend to have the magic formula for capturing this hard-to-harness metric, but we do know that technology can play a key role. One thing we know, integration of systems and data is crucial.

Our survey showed that 75% of recruiters say data from their various HCM systems is not integrated to provide a complete talent lifecycle snapshot. Without that, measuring QofH is always going to be difficult. We’re not saying it’s the silver bullet, but pulling all this data into a single place, and allowing for an easy way to manage, manipulate and analyze that data will go a long way toward making QofH, and other metrics, easier to attain.

Either that, or we can just hire Big Foot and hope for the best.

(originally published on The Jibe Blog)