The Roadmap to Quality Hires

Quality of hire is an interesting topic. I was once interviewed by a journalist who asked “why is this so hard to measure?” An especially important question given the renewed interest in quality of hire in many organisations today.
Quality requires a lot of different moving parts. It requires calculating analytics that measure the performance of candidates, and bench marking that data in order to tune the recruitment, induction and staff development process.
It also involves measuring the quality of service to and from all stakeholders including candidates, employees, hiring managers, recruitment agency partners, the C-Suite, HR, and so on . The measures must be both lead and lag. In short, it can be an intimidating checklist.

Developing a Quality Roadmap

There’s a Quality Roadmap to measuring quality, but it requires a bit of legwork. Functions differ from business to business, but if you’re looking for a cheat sheet, here’s what I’d suggest:

Step 1

Develop a segmented employee or job family based on criticality and scarcity. This will enable you to focus your attention on areas that are important and consider your best approach to all.

Step 2

Integrate the technologies that you use for recruitment and performance management, and also learning and development. This means you can measure, over time, who are your high performers and why.

Step 3

You’ll need to create a competency framework that includes an assessment function that will provide you an understanding of what represents high performance and behaviours. The assessment function should be fine-tuned continuously to ensure that it accurately reflects upon the agreed definitions of a high performer in your organisation.

Step 4

Finally, you’ll require a team or person dedicated to analysing data and providing relevant and timely reports.
Whenever I go through this roadmap with Talent Acquisition leaders, the typical response I get is “I wish” or “in your dreams”. Many cite the difficulty in convincing their senior management to pour investment into this initiative as one of their major challenges – and I totally get it. It is a daunting task that requires time and financial commitment and it cannot be achieve easily.
However, if you are still keen on moving towards this direction, there is a way to increase your quality of hire in the interim, without over committing yourself. Here’s how:

  1. When taking a position description or job brief for the first time, make sure you have five tangible things that you want to see a high performer do in that job after the first three and six months. This can then be surveyed.
  2. Test and assess known high performers and use this screening to benchmark candidates.
  3. Target your referral scheme at critical job families and get other high performers to participate. Birds of the same feather usually flock together and high performers will know other high performers.
  4. Reallocate recruiters who work on the selection process and turn them into analytics experts or sourcers of great talent.

Keep these in mind whilst you strive towards a more holistic Talent Acquisition function, you’ll find it hard to go wrong!
Image: Shutterstock

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