Everyone wants to make a great hire. It’s like the gold medal for recruiting: finding a candidate who has the right skills for the job, performs at peak level, and is a happy addition to your company culture.  

With hiring around the world still in decline and employers vigilant about headcounts, quality of hire has become more important than ever. It’s so important that in LinkedIn’s 2024 Future of Recruiting report talent acquisition professionals cited quality of hire as the No. 1 topic that will shape recruiting over the next five years.

That’s great — except that quality of hire is notoriously difficult for companies to track and measure. For starters, no one’s sure about how exactly to define it. And then there’s the challenge of how to measure quality of hire. Should you look at job performance? Retention? Hiring manager satisfaction?

Given the uncertainty around this all-important topic, we posed the following question to four talent acquisition leaders: How do you think companies should measure and track quality of hire?

Below, you’ll find their illuminating and surprising answers, including a precise mathematical formula for calculating quality of hire:

Hung Lee: Break down departmental silos and create a holistic people function to connect the best data  

"Quality of hire is the hiring metric that CEOs care most about,” says Hung Lee, curator of the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter. “They know one of the most important factors that determines market success is who has the best talent.

“Quality of hire is hard to measure, though. What we have to do is connect two sets of data — candidate assessment scores and employee performance ratings — that usually live on different systems, managed by different departments.

“Breaking through departmental silos and creating a holistic people function is the best way to connect the two."

Tim Sackett: Use a mathematical formula to calculate quality of hire  

“Here’s the issue,” says Tim Sackett, president of HRU Technical Resources, “everyone thinks quality of hire is important, but most don’t actually measure it, or they use a measurement that doesn’t really measure quality of hire.

“From my book The Talent Fix, Vol. 2, here is the actual equation for quality of hire:

“You see,” Tim says, “‘real’ quality of hire is very complex to measure. That is why so many people use things like 90-day turnover. While you can correlate 90-day turnover as a quality of hire measure, there is little causation.

“Here’s the other thing: Quality of hire isn’t a talent acquisition or human resources measure of success. It’s a hiring manager measure of success! Quality of hire is about selection, onboarding, training, and performance. Hiring managers own all of those.

“The better measure of success for TA is the quality of the applicant, which is a simple measure of screened candidates compared with candidates selected for interview by hiring managers. If your TA team is doing its job well, you want it to be in the 80%–90% quality of applicant range.”

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