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Quality of hire is recruiters’ most valuable metric, LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting Report 2019 shows. Some 88% of recruiting professionals said quality of hire would be very important over the next five years.
That’s an acceleration of a trend we’ve seen for years.
Back in 2016, for example, LinkedIn’s Global Reporting Trends Report showed quality of hire was a top metric for 42% of businesses.
What hasn’t changed is, many businesses are still unsure how to actually take control and improve quality of hire. It’s 2020, folks. Let’s sort this out.
As LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting Report says, “The future of recruiting will revolve around strategic metrics: those that measure the business outcomes of your team’s efforts – not just the actions they take.”
Improving quality of hire means taking ownership over recruitment’s impact and proving strategic value to the business.
Let’s do this thing.
Broken into handy categories…
Define what ‘quality’ looks like
1. Decide what you’ll measure
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Decide what metrics you’ll use to assess quality of hire, so you can track progress. Usually a combination of employee retention, employee engagement and performance ratings, LinkedIn say.
2. Reverse-engineer from your best employees
Help your recruiters recognise what often makes a high-quality hire. Map backwards from your best employees. Who’s thriving? Who’s a great cultural fit? Who’s doing surprisingly well? Who’s being promoted? Who’s happiest?
It’ll be difficult to form any quantitative conclusions but subjective impressions matter. If possible, hold interviews with top employees. Brainstorm with recruiters, to better understand quality markers for your biz.
3. Create business-wide accountability
Quality-of-hire isn’t recruiters’ sole responsibility. Look at the metrics involved in calculating it – retention, engagement and performance. They’re everyone’s responsibility: HR, L&D, D&I, managers, executives.
If your business is serious about improving quality of hire, it can’t just be a recruitment initiative. Recruitment can lead the charge but a cross-functional team with bigger-picture vision is best placed to drive change.
4. Work closer with hiring managers
61% of hiring managers say recruiters have only a low to moderate understanding of the jobs they recruit for, LinkedIn say. Better collaboration is vital – because you can’t improve quality of hire if you don’t know what would make a quality hire.
Normalise deeper hiring manager involvement upfront, to nail the internal job description and recruiters’ understanding before resourcing starts.
Attract better quality applications
5. Craft compelling job adverts
In 2014, Lou Adler wrote about how “most job postings are written to weed out weaker candidates, not attract stronger ones.” He notes how the underlying assumption – that there’s a huge talent pool of top candidates needing trimming down – is totally wrong.
The same’s true in 2020. Even when you’re battling huge application volumes, most markets are still candidate-driven.
Instead of publishing bland internal job descriptions designed to weed out unqualified applicants, write job adverts designed to attract the best. (Brush up your copywriting skills with this practical toolkit.)
6. Emphasise your culture
All three metrics that contribute to quality of hire calculations (retention, engagement, performance) depend on new hires’ being a great culture fit.
Browse any job board now though and most roles copy-and-paste skills with no discussion of culture. Agency recruiters typically avoid talking about specifics for fear of other recruiters stealing their clients or roles – so there’s space for in-house recruitment teams to steal the show here.
Use job adverts to showcase your culture, to improve quality of hire by attracting better-fit candidates from the get-go.
To find out the remaining ways to improve the quality of hiring, click here or the button below.
