Recruiters leave no stone unturned to get the best candidate on board. And to ensure an effective recruitment process, they try to balance the time to hire, the cost of hire, the candidate experience they offer, and the quality of hire. But in the crowd of the key recruitment metrics, the quality of hire is often undervalued.
Quality of hire is a vital recruitment metric and can impact the success of a company’s hiring process. But improving and measuring it is not easy. Using an online skill-testing platform can prove effective for you. However, you need to go to the extra mile. Before you start your journey toward improving the quality of hires, read the blog to explore more about this –
What is the quality of hire?
Quality of hire is the measurement of the value that a new hire adds to the company. An effective hiring process refers to the right talent being matched to the right position and can dramatically impact overall company performance.
Why is it important to measure the quality of hire?
Understanding your quality of hire metric helps you pinpoint the loopholes and thus enables you to improve the strategies to achieve the desired outcome. Although measuring the quality of hire isn’t easy, measuring it can provide you with actionable and valuable insights into your hiring process.
Better quality of hires scores can help companies reduce overheads connected with identifying and retaining the best hires. Moreover, it can drive revenue growth. Also, it’s crucial to assess the job performance of the talent acquisition team.
To make sure the best candidates are on board, companies need to measure, track, and examine the quality of hires over time. Thus, organizations can achieve improved hiring processes and quality of hires over time.
How to measure your quality of hire?
There is no “one-size-fits-all” metric to measure the quality of hire as it depends on your key priorities.
As per the LinkedIn reports, the top three ways quality of hire is measured are –
- Retention rate – It refers to the length of the time a new hire stays at the company. For example, it is calculated as a rate of new hires staying in the company vs. new hires leaving within 90 days post-hire or within the first year of hire.
- Time to fill – The time it takes to fill a job position (e.g., measured by the number of days taken)
- Hiring satisfaction: The satisfaction level of the hiring manager with the new hire is from 0 to 10.
Other common qualities of hire metrics include –
- Ramp-up-time – An employee’s time to full productivity
- Job performance – Measured by supervisor’s performance ratings or objective data like sales
- Employee engagement – It’s measured by the new hire’s self-ratings
- Cultural fit – Measured by 360 ratings of the new hire’s mentors and colleagues
Preparing a simple quality of hire index is a valuable starting point to assess whether your recruitment process is on the right track or not.
How to measure the quality of hire of an individual employee?
If you want to prepare a quality of hire index for an employee, it will look like this –
(job performance + Employee engagement + Ramp-up time + Cultural Fit)/N*
*N = Number of indicators (in this case, N= 4)
A vital detail here is to ensure all your measurements are using the same scale (e.g., all scores out of 10 or 100)
How do we measure the average quality of hire of all new employees?
Find the average of all new employees’ quality of hire scores to generate an average quality of hire score:
(Sum of the quality of hire scores for all new hires/Number of new hires)
Also Read: 5 Ways to Improve Time to Hire with Pre-Employment Assessment Software
7 Ways to improve the quality of hire by using online skill testing platform
Once you have a clear idea about how successful your hiring efforts are, you can work on ways to improve your company’s quality of hire. While improving the hiring process is a long-term investment, it will help you effectively.
Here we have listed down a few tips to improve your quality of hire –
- Measure your current quality of hire
Before you look for ways to improve your quality of hire, knowing and understanding your current score is an excellent way to start. Once you measure how you are doing with the quality of hire, you can set SMART goals for improvement – where you want to be in six months, one year, or so on. Making an effective plan will help you keep track of your activities and results and refine the process with time.
- Collaborate with hiring managers
According to a LinkedIn report on data-driven recruiting, 61% of managers have a low to moderate understanding of the jobs they are hiring for. When it comes to improving your quality of hire, collaboration is vital. Hiring managers play a significant role in the recruiting process, including refining job descriptions, screening candidates, guiding business goals and objectives, etc. Involving them in the hiring process helps you improve the likelihood of hiring the right candidate for the right position.
- Give an accurate overview of the job role
A significant way to improve the quality of hire is to provide a clear overview of the job position and the company during the hiring efforts. With an engaging job posting and a detailed job description, you have a better chance of reaching candidates who are the ideal fit for the organization.
- Add skill testing
Skills testing is designed to assess and measure candidates’ skills, abilities, and job fitness to determine their suitability for a role. According to Talent Board’s Candidate Experience report, 82% of companies use skills testing to screen candidates.
Choosing a credible online skill testing platform for pre-employment assessment tests can reduce costs and enhance efficiencies within the hiring process. Besides, it helps identify the most suitable and promising candidate quickly.
- Do a skills gap analysis
The Americans believe that there is an almost 80% skill gap. So, it’s no wonder that Deloitte predicts this could have a $2.5b trillion impact on the US economy within the next decade.
As companies struggle to find suitable talent, unfilled positions can cost businesses upwards of $800,000 per year. This is why it’s essential to address the skills gap.
Skills gap analysis helps identify the gap between your existing workforce’s current skill sets and the skills you need to realize your long-term goals. Determine your future goals, measure your existing workforce, plan to upskill or retain your current employees, or look for the desired talent to fill the skill gap.
- Make objective hiring decisions
Traditional hiring methods are highly subjective and often cause bad hires. However, there are various ways to make the recruitment process more objective and bias-free nowadays. It can include multiple things such as defining job requirements, conducting structured interviews, using skill assessments, and more. Using pre-employment hiring assessment tests helps you get detailed reports of candidates’ abilities that you can use to make bias-free hiring decisions.
- Review and refine the result
Improving your company’s quality of hire is a long-term process. So, you need to evaluate your data continually to find out what’s working and what’s not. And based on the report, you need to prepare a recruitment strategy and align it with the current recruitment trends and your business objectives to enhance the hiring quality.
Also Read: Cheat Sheet to Hire Top Developers
How does Skillsz help you improve the quality of hire?
Skillsz is an online skill-testing platform used to quickly screen and shortlist the best developers. Designed to reduce the burden on the shoulder of recruiters, HRs, and the talent acquisition team, it helps you create skill tests, customize these as per your recruitment needs, send invitations to candidates, and check detailed reports instantly.
As Skillsz offers you detailed reports highlighting candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, you can use them to make data-driven and bias-free hiring decisions that ultimately improve the quality of hire.
Skillsz’s ready-to-use library of 5000+ questions, randomized question selection, and the anti-fraud cheating feature also contribute to quality hiring. The questions based on real-life scenarios help evaluate candidates’ capability for individual job profiles, while cheating prevention features ensure no one can take any unfair measures during the test.
To design a skill test for quality hiring or know more about Skillsz, start a 14-day free trial today!
Bottom line
Improving the quality of hire will not happen overnight. The long-term rewards, on the other hand, will push you to work on it.
To make this change happen, you need to create a strategic recruitment process, follow the above-mentioned tips, and involve resources dedicated to improving the quality score. Although you may face initial challenges, it will gradually improve with time by engaged employees, increased retention, better hiring across the board, etc.
And if you want to use an online assessment platform for quality hiring, choose Skillsz. To know how it will help you, start a 14-day free trial today!
About Skillsz
Skillsz allows companies to assess developers with online programming tests and thus, makes recruitment easy and effective. Besides, it enables companies to filter out unqualified candidates and find the best talent quickly. Create coding tests, invite candidates, check results, and find the best talent. Does it sound interesting? Start a 14-day free trial today!