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What Makes a Quality Hire and How Can You Track It?

Quality hire - if you're in HR, you've probably heard that phrase at least a hundred times. Some of you may even hear quality hire thrown around a hundred times per day, and for good reason. Ensuring that you attract a potential quality hire is fundamental to both your recruiting success and the success of your company long term because great employees lead to organizational achievement.

We talk a lot about finding a quality hire to our hiring software clients, but I don't think we've ever defined what a quality hire is on this blog or listed specific steps to take in order to measure how a quality hire rates. Let's do that today.

What is a quality hire?

This is the first step in trying to determine the parameters for identifying a quality hire, and yet, it's oftentimes the most difficult. The reason it's so difficult is due to the ever-evolving boundaries that dictate what makes a quality hire.

When determining what a quality hire looks like to your organization, here are some questions to ask yourself:

What is your company's mission currently and how can your employees contribute to that mission?
What are your strengths from an employee perspective?
What are your weaknesses from an employee perspective?
What is your C-suite trying to emphasize right now?
Is it strengthening your employee culture?
Or are they more focused on trying to cut turnover costs or increase production?

Asking yourself (and others) these questions can help give you a better idea of the type of person you should target as a best case scenario quality hire. Additionally, narrowing down who you're looking for can help you write a more targeted job ad.

Insure your quality hire.

One of the best insurance policies you have at your disposal in the search for a quality hire is using pre-employment tests. Unfortunately, they're a resource that often goes untouched in the HR spheres because they're widely misunderstood.

Many wrongly assume that these tests measure "personality traits" or parts of person that are classified as immovable (and therefore discriminatory). It's true that employing these types of tests could work you into a compliance tizzy quickly, but opting for research supported tests that measure behavior are a whole other animal completely. These tests create benchmarks from your top performers and help provide you with a blueprint for the behavioral traits your quality hire should possess.

Instead of relying solely on your "gut" to make hiring decisions, you can seek solace in statistical likelihood that your new, quality hire will follow in your star employee's high performance footsteps.

How do you know your new employee is a quality hire?

Pre-employment tests are great for helping you decide whether or not you have a quality hire on your hands, but where do you go from there?

Tracking the success of your alleged quality hire is the true test of whether or not your team made the right hiring decision.

There are a few methods for going about this, but one of the most reliable is conducting a performance review. If you have some fairly substantial performance benchmarks in place, simply measure how well your "quality hire" performs against top employees. You can pick several dates across a 90-day period and then conduct your performance review after that period has lapsed. The downside of this is that you will have to take into consideration the initial learning curve that comes with adjusting to a new position and also working for a new company.

Another great tool for measuring the success of your quality hire is to create a customer satisfaction survey. If your quality hire was placed in a customer support or sales position, this should be fairly straight forward. If not, you can survey fellow employees that work with your new hire on a regular basis.