5 Ways To Improve Quality of Hires?

54% of recruiters voted quality of hire as their top priority in 2024. Many staffing & recruitment industry pros see the quality of hire as the North Star metric to assess the overall health of recruitment processes at any organization. At an SHRM Talent Conference, Tim Sackett, author of The Talent Fix, said that he too feels the Quality of Hire is an important metric. However, he also said, “If it (quality of hire) was so important, there would be a known formula that everyone would know and use.” Sackett was probably hinting at the confusion that envelopes hiring managers' headspace when it comes to calculating the quality of hire recruitment metric. Well, in our last Skima AI insight, we did share a formula to calculate the quality of hire. Read this insight, wherein we shall discuss why the quality of hire metric matters, the benefits of enhancing the quality of hire, and how to improve the quality of hires.

Why Quality Of Hire Matters?

When you don’t proactively invest in building a quality pool of talent density, your organization becomes an incubation compound for recruitment challenges, and how badly you score at quality of hire reflects how fast the challenges may multiply, then be it your talent challenges or recruitment challenges. With a poor quality of hire-

Attracting & Retaining Quality Talent Becomes As Tough As Pulling a Truck Uphill With Your Teeth
55% of leaders are worried if they will have enough talent to fill new roles or not. To add to the worry, 46% of employees say that they are considering to quit in 2025. It’s 6% higher than the year before the great reshuffle, aka the great resignation. In 2022, out of all the separations from organizations, 70% of them were voluntary quits, 25% were layoffs, and the remaining were attributed to other reasons. One way or the other, these challenges are rooted in the quality of hire, because it encompasses a range of things including employee performance, cultural fit, core skills, soft skills, and whatnot. So, if it is coming down to resignation or layoffs, the metric to be looked at is the quality of hire.
You End Up With A High-Density of Bad Hires
There can be a multitude of reasons why an employee quits, or the contract gets terminated by the organization (layoffs). Whatever the reason, almost every separation can be considered a case of a bad hire, which you need to avoid as a recruiter. 75% of employers, at some point, have hired a bad hire. And on average, a bad hire costs a company $17,000. So, we guess, you must audit and fix your recruitment process to sieve out bad hires.

In short, you need to keep employee turnover under control. The attrition did come down by as much as 26% in the last year i.e., April 2023 - Mar 2024, but it might reverse again.

Also, you need to be aware of the factors that fuel the quit movement.

Every layoff or resignation negatively affects the company morale, the talent density, and the bottom line of the company.

Among multiple other ways like improving the candidate experience, augmenting the employee experience and providing competitive salaries, a key way to reduce attrition and solve the aforementioned challenges is to improve the quality of hires at the recruitment stage. It is the sensible thing to do. Shouldn’t we try to solve the problem at the source itself?

The Benefits of Improving Quality of Hire

Fill the skill gap
Improve the talent density
Tap market opportunities
Lead with innovation
Reduce attrition
Reduce cost-per-hire

How To Improve Quality Of Hire?

To improve the quality of hire is an endless tug of war. It’s a continuous battle. It tests your endurance. You need to be very picky about every single hire. Use as much automation as possible in your recruitment lifecycle to buy your recruiting pros ample time to use their human ingenuity to carry out robust and effective pre-hiring QoH assessments for each hire.

Here are some of the suggestions for you to improve the quality of hire recruitment metric-

1. Set A Benchmark For Quality of Hire (QoH)

Skima AI published a formula to quantify your quality of hire, which anyone can use as the formula fits the bill no matter what your approach to determining the quality of hire. As per an old LinkedIn report-

50% of employers use performance to measure quality of hire.
49% rely on turnover and retention metrics to assess the quality of hire.
43% depend on the hiring manager's satisfaction score to evaluate how good a hire is.

Irrespective of how you measure the quality of hire. The first step is to set a benchmark against which you can compare your performance. Ideally, we recommend keeping it a mix of different variables. QoH is not that simple of a recruitment metric. It is a derived metric which is dependent on a multitude of other factors. For instance, to get the exact pulse of quality of hire, do encompass the following in your calculation of quality of hire-

Performance
Turnover
Time to Productivity
Cultural Fit
Engagement Levels
Leadership and other Soft-skills
Hiring Manager Satisfaction

Again, refer to Skima AI’s formula for calculating the quality of hire, if you want to accurately measure QoH.

2. Shift To Data-driven HR

Only 41% of HR & recruitment professionals are data-savvy i.e., those who are making effective use of data to steer business outcomes. The remaining 59% are laggards, and falling behind their tech-savvy counterparts.

In fact, most of the HR professionals don’t even have a thorough understanding of their businesses. Only about 45% understand the macroeconomic and microeconomic drivers that impact their business.

Upskilling and shifting to a more data-led recruitment initiative can bring much-needed transparency and clarity into your recruitment processes. It may help you better understand what’s working in favor, and what’s dragging you down.

Data-driven HR helps you improve the quality of hires by making recruitment outcomes tangible for you, so that, you can compare and look for improvement opportunities.

Here’s how you bank on data-driven HR to improve the quality of hire metric-

Use performance data of employees, and look for factors that help boost performance, or if there is a dip in performance, look out for potential reasons, and accordingly address them.
Proactively, identify workforce skill gaps, and try to upskill the workforce or bridge the gap by hiring the right talent.
Assess the candidate engagement or employee experience metrics. Look for employee growth metrics, training and development metrics, etcetera.

You will gain loads of actionable insights from a data-first recruitment & hiring approach. These insights will help you reduce attrition, maintain a competent workforce, and deliver tangible business value.

3. Improve Your Candidate Sourcing Strategies

There has been a 36% spike in the number of job posts that didn’t mention any degree requirement on LinkedIn. 73% of recruiters say that hiring based on skill is the top priority right now. Omitting degree requirements, and rather relying on skills expands the available talent pool by 10X. The bigger the sea, the more the chances of hooking a big fish. So, you can improve your candidate pool by supercharging your talent-sourcing strategies to find good hires.

Use proactive recruitment strategies and creative recruiting hacks.
Follow job description best practices to optimize them to attract only qualified candidates.
Distribute your job posts to niche job boards to be more visible among the right jobseeker personas.
Strengthen your employer brand as it is a proven hack to attract qualified talent that sticks to your organization. Use career sites, social media, and PR to build a strong employer brand.

4. Enhance Your Talent Density

Adapt to a skill-first and cultural-fit-focused hybrid hiring strategy. As per research, exceptional performers do not follow the normal distribution pattern, but rather the power principle. That means, 20% of the performers do the 80% of the work. Companies like Netflix and Google capitalized on this and built a culture of hiring only the high-performers. Netflix popularized a concept called “talent density.” It is the ratio of the total number of exceptional performers in your workforce to that of the total workforce size. The concept evangelizes hiring one guy who does the task of 5 and doing everything feasible to retain that talent. Sticking to high talent density unlocks a domino effect for your organization.

First, with minimal effort the right talent automatically gets attracted to your organization, because who doesn’t want to work with the very best?
Second, your capability to innovate or solve problems in record time just shoots over the roof.

Obviously, focusing on talent density will help improve your quality of hire metric, as at the core, talent density in itself is all about quality hires. To improve talent density, you would need a clear strategic approach and alignment of the top leadership. You can’t hire the best without compensating the best in the market, or without providing them with the best culture conducive to growth, freedom, innovation, and experimentation.

5. Audit Your Recruitment Lifecycle Processes, and Iteratively Improve It

Channel your hiring team resources toward delivering a delightful candidate experience. Check for the processes in your recruitment lifecycle that can be further enhanced for better outcomes. For instance,

60% of candidates drop off during the application process solely because of the lengthy applications. Keeping your applications short, and asking only the relevant details in the form can help enhance the candidate experience. Subsequently, it will help reduce the drop-off rate during the interview process. As a matter of fact, 69% of employees are more likely to stick with the company for 3 years if they have a positive onboarding experience. It also helped boost new hire productivity by up to 50%.
Similarly, train your recruitment professionals to communicate effectively, and negotiate better. This can help overcome the decision barriers that top talent might be facing before accepting your offer proposal.
You may also do away with any conscious or unconscious recruitment bias or time-taking processes by automating your recruitment process with AI recruiting tools. From talent management using top ATS for startups to creating perfect job descriptions using AI job description generator tools, screening candidate’s resumes, scheduling interviews, assessing skills, and candidate onboarding— everything can be automated today. See if that can help you deliver a better candidate experience and reap better hiring outcomes.

How Skima AI Helps You Improve Quality-of-Hire?

Would you use a tool that helps you find quality candidates, engage with top-qualified candidates, and then hire them to help steer your organization to greater heights?

Skima AI does all three. It helps you improve your quality of hire, reduces your time to fill, and minimizes your cost per hire. It empowers recruiters in 4 core operational functionalities-

Attract the right talent with clear & detailed job descriptions
With Skima AI Job Description Generator, you can create stellar and to-the-point skill-focused job descriptions to attract the right talent.
Spot the right talent in your candidate pool
Skima AI Matching Score product feature helps in finding the right candidates from your candidate pool by vetting them against your job descriptions and the requirements specified there. It helps you make smart hiring decisions with smart talent recommendations for your job roles.
You can power your skill-first hiring strategies with skill ontology-powered search filters. Not just that, you may even use Skima AI’s advanced search filters for diversity-focused hiring strategies.
Engage with your talent pool
Skima AI’s recruitment solution comes with an inbuilt candidate engagement feature, that helps you automate candidate follow-ups, outreach, and other necessary communications. Now, never lose a candidate because of communication delays or gaps.
Help improve recruiter productivity with workflow automation
Skima AI integrates with a wide range of recruitment software to automate every aspect of the recruitment process including candidate interview scheduling, assessments, and onboarding. With Skima AI, you can automate recruitment end-to-end while enhancing your visibility into the process.