In his Myth on Average, Todd Rose uses the analogy of fighter planes and pilots to explain that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy that can be implemented to improve hiring. Good hiring involves customizing your process and offerings to meet the needs of each individual candidate. 

The current hiring practices are ill-fitted to ensure great candidate experience and engagement for securing better quality hires. A performance-based hiring process can increase the quality of hiring and lead to employee satisfaction and retention.   

In 2019, 88% of the recruiters felt that the quality of hires would be crucial in the coming years, against 42% in 2016, per a LinkedIn report. The report further said,

 “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.”  

Many recruiters still face a challenge in getting the right fit for the job openings and are often left seeking in the dark for better quality hires. This article takes a deep dive into practical tips that recruiters can follow to improve the quality of hires for their organization. 

Benefits of improving quality of hire 

Hiring the right candidates can be beneficial in many ways, including:

#1 Better retention rate

When the right employees get hired for the right role, they feel satisfied and motivated at work and are more loyal to the organization. 

#2 Greater Productivity

Motivated candidates work efficiently and productively to contribute to the success and growth of the company.

#3 Lower costs

Better retention and turnover rates help to lower acquisition costs. 

#4 Time and effort saving

Good hires result in satisfied hiring managers who need not toil screening resumes and conducting interviews to onboard new candidates.

#5 Long-term benefits

Satisfied employees contribute to the success of the firm in the long run. Also, organizations can build their brand image and work culture as equitable, diverse, and open for all.  

Practical ways to improve the quality of hire 

Organizations can leverage high-performing employees to ensure long-term business success and 400% more productivity than the average employee. Quality of hire is one of the key recruitment metrics today that recruiters are increasingly focused on.  

Current hiring practices are not feasible to improve and measure the quality of hire, given their generic approach to stating candidate competencies and hiring practices. 

To amp up their hiring game, recruiters must clearly understand the three parameters: the actual job requirements, optimized recruitment programs, and metrics for performance.  

Here are 10 useful ways recruiters can improve the quality of hire for their next writing assignment.

Parameter 1: the actual job requirements

#1 Have a clear overview of job requirements 

Around 61% of hiring managers feel that recruiters have a low to moderate understanding of the roles for which they are hiring. Recruiters must collaborate with hiring managers to improve the quality of the hire. 

When hiring managers collaborate and provide their input at each hiring stage, your job descriptions will be more refined and accurate, and the likelihood of hiring a good candidate will increase.  

You can also involve teams in the hiring process for which the hiring is being done. The team members could easily recognize the skill gaps and help assess the candidate better. 

Misleading or unrealistic job descriptions are a complete no-no, as they are bound to result in unmotivated employees, underqualified hires, and increased turnover rates for the company. A job description must be as accurate as possible to engage the right candidate and give realistic expectations of the role.   

#2 Define performance objectives instead of qualifications 

When you say you require a marketing executive that can deliver a new product launch campaign that targets 20% of the market share in a stipulated period of time, you are giving them a measurable objective for performance. Every job description can have 6 to 8 such objectives to define the exceptional performance you desire in the candidate. 

Instead of saying blandly, ‘the candidate should have an MBA degree from so and so institute and n number of years of experience,’ opt for performance objectives as in the latter, you are asking for a pre-hire metric of their performance. You will be comparing the quality of the results with the pre-hire metric you sought in the job description.   

#3 Use storytelling in job descriptions 

Putting a job description in bullets is the most somber way to attract quality hires. The ‘Must have’ and ‘Required’ phrases in the job description are a big turn-off for candidates.  

The job description you post must compel the candidates to apply for the role and achieve marketing objectives simultaneously. Catchy career stories can also get passive candidates excited.

Tell career stories, create a candidate persona, or simply tell your brand story and how the candidate can play a crucial part and contribute to the growth of the company. 

An example could be ‘Use your copywriting skills to create compelling brand stories for our clients’ or ‘Bring in your coding skills and create applications that change how we use smartphones and so on.  

#4 Use AI-based Screening tests

A smart recruitment process must include skill-based tests to measure and assess candidates’ skills and abilities, including their behavioral profiles. While skill and ability tests can be great for judging their suitability for a role, behavioral tests help assess their pliability and sync in relation to the work culture and environment. 

Over 3/4ths of companies use skill tests to screen their candidates. Along with the interview, skill tests help recruiters drive efficiency in the recruitment process by helping to funnel down and identify more suitable candidates. 

AI-based skill tests can be a great way to custom-check the capability of any candidate and remove unconscious bias from hiring decisions. When recruitment is automated, the process becomes speedy, and the candidate experience is improved. Candidate experience directly impacts the quality of hires by helping to retain qualified talent.    

Parameter 2: Optimized recruitment programs 

#5 Opt for Out-of-box channels

In this era of social media, sticking to a single recruiting channel or the conventional job portals can heavily restrict your talent base. Instead, rephrase your recruitment strategy and out-of-the-box channels like Twitter, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc.  

Investing in social media marketing tools and accessing the maximum channel outreach can get you better candidates in more compelling ways. Seek long-term motives by building talent communities. 

Set up communication with candidates, start conversations, engage with people on LinkedIn and other social media sites, and proactively grow a base of quality people which you can access any time you need. 

#6 Conduct a great onboarding process 

Candidate experience is the prime factor responsible for improving the quality of hires. And a great onboarding experience led by engaging conversations is a sure-shot way to retain the best candidates. 

A great onboarding experience ensures the candidate stays with the company for long. The new hire will better understand their role and build repartee with their peers. When recruiters build a good onboarding process, they help to reduce the turnover rate and improve the quality of hire. 

#7 Organize candidate trials 

Recruiting employees is a long-term commitment and should be proceeded with utmost care and caution. When a candidate is selected for a job role, trial days can be a great medium for employers and employees to test the waters. 

You can check whether the candidate is responsive to challenges and common situations and if they can gel with their colleagues. Trial days can also function as on-the-job tests to measure the candidate’s current skills and capability to learn new skills. 

Depending on the job requirements, these trial days can be fully-remote or in-office days. 

Parameter 3: metrics for performance

#8 Consider organization-wide accountability

Retention, engagement, and performance as metrics aren’t just restricted to the HR department. It should be the responsibility of all the departments, executives, and managers to give input and collect data to help refine the recruitment process and improve the quality of hire. 

Skill gap analyses can be great for identifying the gaps between the current skill set and desired skill set of your workforce. The analysis can be used to set future goals and make plans for upskilling and seeking new talent. 

#9 Measure pre- and post-hire metrics 

As a preliminary step to measuring the pre- and post-hire metrics, recruiters must consider assessing the current quality of hire first. This can be crucial to improve new hires’ quality and realign the required quality of talent for a particular role. 

Usually, organizations use metrics like time-to-hire, retention rate, turnover rate, and ramp-up rate to calculate the quality of hire and the hiring process. The data points can be used to calculate the quality of hire for individual candidates and the overall organization.   

The metrics can also be used to identify the weak links in the hiring process and refine it. 

#10 Invest in the right tools 

Collecting the data from the right sources is as crucial as the accuracy of it required to bring in meaningful changes. Rules and standards for data collection should be comprehensively and methodically laid down before the process begins. 

We already discussed the important qualitative metrics to be used. Employee engagement surveys and performance reviews may be good practices for assessing qualitative metrics. 

Organizations can opt for software solutions and tools that can collect and process large piles of data and present reports and analyses of the same in a useful and effective form. Today, the HRMS market is replete with software solutions that can cater to a suite of recruitment-related activities or just a single need. 

These tools can measure and track employee performance, compile data to deduce useful insights, and automate assessments. 

Wrap-up

A good recruitment strategy is essential to improve the quality of hire and employee satisfaction. Of course, none of these results will show overnight. When qualified candidates are right-fitted into a job, the quality of work improves, and productivity and employee satisfaction increases, resulting in better-engaged employees. 

Customizing the hiring strategy to include a wide spectrum of candidates would increase the available talent pool and help lower the costs of procuring new candidates. Overcoming the initial challenges and consistently working towards achieving the best talent will gradually improve the quality of hire, the competitive edge, and the overall health of the company. 

FAQs on Quality of Hire