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The Daily Insight

What is quality of hire and how do companies use it?

Author

Henry Morales

Published Mar 14, 2026

Quality of hire is a quantifiable measure of the effectiveness of the recruiting process to hire productive employees. An effective hiring process — one in which the right talent is matched to the right position — can have a dramatic impact on overall company performance.

How do you determine quality of hire?

To measure quality of hire, you’ll want to use an average of various metrics that gauge performance of new hires.

  1. Performance Metrics.
  2. Team Satisfaction & Fit: Manager and Peer Feedback.
  3. New Hire Satisfaction: Employee Engagement.
  4. Improve your candidate pool.
  5. Reference checks – Peer feedback.
  6. Eliminate Bias.

Why is quality of hire important?

Using the quality of hire metric to identify and track a company’s bad and top hires, and how they were recruited, allows hiring teams to get a better understanding of success and failure areas in their processes and make strategic choices to improve hiring performance.

How is hiring process determined?

To get started, here are few of the most common recruitment metrics for you to consider:

  1. Time to Fill. Time to fill is one of the most common recruitment statistics companies monitor to determine the effectiveness of their recruiting process.
  2. Quality of Hire.
  3. Source of Hire.
  4. Cost per Hire.
  5. Applicant Satisfaction.

How can quality of hire be improved?

How to improve quality of hire

  1. Measure your current quality of hire. If you’re looking to improve your quality of hire, knowing and understanding your current score is a good place to start.
  2. Cooperate with hiring managers.
  3. Give an accurate overview of the role.
  4. Collect the right data.
  5. Leverage artificial intelligence.

How do you measure and improve quality of hire?

Companies use various indicators in measuring quality of hire, performance appraisal score being the most popular.

  1. Retention. This is often used as an indicator to measure the quality of hire.
  2. Ramp-up time.
  3. Productivity.
  4. Employee Lifetime Value.
  5. Pre-hire metrics.
  6. Employee engagement survey.
  7. New hire performance metrics.

How can we improve the quality of recruitment?

10 Tips to Improve the Efficiency of Your Recruitment Process

  1. Utilize an ATS.
  2. Only Include Must-Haves in Your job descriptions.
  3. Prioritize candidate communication.
  4. Lean on your current employees.
  5. Meet elite candidates where they are.
  6. Streamline Your Interview Process.
  7. Build out your talent pipeline.
  8. Showcase your culture.

What are the 3 key performance indicators of a successful new customer recruitment process?

Top 11 Recruiting KPIs for 2021

  1. Time to Hire.
  2. Sourcing Channel Efficiency.
  3. Number of Qualified Candidates.
  4. Submit to Interview Ratio.
  5. Interview to Offer Ratio.
  6. Offer Acceptance Rate.
  7. Cost Per Hire.
  8. Quality of Hire.

What is a KPI in recruitment?

Recruiting KPIs are specific metrics that help you measure the effectiveness of your hiring process and your recruiting team. KPIs use data to provide insights into how close (or far) you are from reaching your recruiting goals and helps you make more strategic decisions about where to allocate your time and money.

What are quality hiring practices?

Quality of hire defined Quality of hire is essentially the value a new hire contributes to the company’s overall success. This is measured based on various indicators, like an employee’s performance and tenure at the organization.

What is a good time to fill metric?

Time to fill is the number of days between when a job requisition is approved and the day an offer is accepted by the candidate. Time to fill is a measure of how efficient your recruiting process is. SHRM’s latest survey finds the average time to fill is 41 days.

How is quality of talent measured?

Quality of hire indicators

  1. Job performance. According to LinkedIn, 50% of companies consider performance reviews (or just performance in general) when measuring quality of hire.
  2. Retention.
  3. Ramp-up time.
  4. Productivity.
  5. Employee Lifetime Value (ELV)
  6. Pre-hire metrics.
  7. Hiring manager satisfaction survey.
  8. Employee engagement survey.

What is the most important KPI for talent acquisition?

The Most Important Recruiting Coordinator KPIs and Talent Acquisition Metrics Every Recruiter Needs to Master.

  1. Time to Hire. The time to hire KPI is one of the easier talent acquisition metrics to measure.
  2. Quality of Hire.
  3. Sourcing Channel Efficiency.
  4. Adverse Impact.
  5. Candidate Experience (Net Promoter Score)

How can you improve the quality of hiring?

11 Ways to Improve Quality of Hire

  1. Using a Performance-based Hiring Process to improve quality of hire.
  2. Define exceptional performance rather than an exceptional person.
  3. Don’t post internal job descriptions.
  4. Turn job descriptions into stories to attract stronger people.
  5. Embed the skills into your career stories.

What is the most important recruiting metric?

The most important recruitment metric is quality applicants. And that is measured not by hires, but by interviews. We cannot completely control what happens after an interview. But if a candidate is good enough to get to that stage, then they are a quality applicant.

What is the formula for quality of fill?

The quality-of-fill version is called the “net quality score.” Net quality score is simply the sum of all hires in the last year, minus those who scored in the bottom half of all employees at their first performance review.

How do you measure applicant satisfaction?

Candidate satisfaction is measured using a candidate satisfaction score. This is another qualitative concept that is quantitatively measured. Candidates rate their overall satisfaction with the hiring process up to a given point from 1 – 10.

By measuring the quality of hire, you ensure that only candidates who are a good culture fit or a culture add are onboarded into the workforce. A great hire can also dramatically improve the elements of positive culture, such as employee engagement and diversity and inclusion.

Which is the best definition of quality of hire?

Quality of hire is defined as the value a new hire adds to your company. Specifically, how much a new hire contributes to your company’s long term success. Based on its definition, it’s obvious why quality of hire is considered such a priority. But quality of hire is also the most difficult recruiting metric to measure and assess.

How to measure the quality of a hiring process?

In order to get an indication of how successful your recruiting process is in general, quality of hire can be scaled by averaging the scores of all hires and including the retention rate. New hire retention = (# of new hires who remained employed for the measurement period) / (# of new hires at start of measurement period) x 100

When to use QOH to measure quality of hire?

QoH is a difficult metric. It has a long term horizon and you can only measure it many months after you’ve made a hire. Also, reliable measurements need standardized formulas.

How is quality of hire related to other metrics?

You can also connect quality of hire with other metrics to make data-driven adjustments. For example, a recruiter may notice that based on metrics, hires of lower quality are all coming from a specific source of hire, which can then inform your future recruiting strategies.