In a perfect world we know this would be important in order to make improvements. The reality is that most companies do not have the time or the people resources to measure quality of hire. Certainly the use of job boards have made it easy to hire non strategic staff in an employer market where jobs are in short supply. There are BI - business intelligence software that can easily determine the profile of the most succcessful employees hired. This is already being done in Banking industry to determine the profiles of the most profitable customers.

Most companies strive to hire strategic talent however they do not have the time or the resources to develop quality talent with little support allowed to hire a new employee to be successful in a 90 probationary period. Even the most successful employee with the ideal profile will fail if not given the proper environment to succeed. Most companies want to hire someone who can be up and running with no training and no corporate support. Most companies try to operate with a very lean people head count that ignores the fact that great employees have approached the company and make it virtually impossible to hire talent because hiring is not in the budget.

It is stated that major companies in the Western World including Canada and the United States have low unemployment rates due to low birth rates in the last 20 years. This interesting event as taken place are consequences due to higher individual and small business taxes and high cost of living with generally 2 people working in a household. Meanwhile U.S multinational corporations are paying the lowest corporate taxes since World War 2. Countries such as Canada are encouraging immigration policies to address this serious low birth rate.

With the emphasis now on a employee market….more and more companies will have difficulty hiring people.Unfortunately more and more time will be spent finding and hiring people if the companies fail to recognize that the market has changed. Most companies in the last 20 years have failed to develop great employees because it takes to much time and money to develop great employees in the short term. Not every company has the talent or the resources of a GE. Not every company has Jack Welch as the CEO.

Limited Time and Budget contraints….will be determining factors in attracting the best and the brightest. No one here is to suggest that measuring is not important. The answers are there but unfortunately HR budgets and HR People are not and in some cases limited by budget constraints. There is no one there to do a proper job of measuring except the hiring managers are not trained to interview….let alone hire….yet more and more of these individuals are being forced to accept the hire function in addition to their own jobs. By being overworked and underpaid, no one can expect a senior manager to be working at top performance. These people will quit and seek employment elsewhere. The question is why should someone work over 60 to 80 hours a week for an average salary at the expense of one’s personal life?

There is not right or wrong answer to hiring. Unfortunately we have a fast food mentality that hiring great people is EASY. We also are seeing more and more Executives being hired to perform and fulfill unrealistic expectations that require long term thinking that are being curtailed by short term profit results. Most corporations have failed to develop talent and will have no choice but to hire and pay more to lure away top talent from the competition. There are also issue of 4 generations of workers with the oldest workers being discriminated against for younger workers.Talent should be the deciding factor and not age and certainly not ethnic origin.

Measure all you want….the reality is that the real killer to corporate productivity are longterm vacancies, high turner, shortterm corporate planning, lack of infracture and indifferent overpaid management teams, adversion to diversity hiring. The consequences are enormous and adversely affect retention of customers, and retention of key employees.
The reality is that most people in these companies know what the answers. The majority of these corporations prefer the status quo rather than change. They also prefer denial rather than problem solving to address these real problems that make measuring irrelevant.

Cheers,

I think that has to be evaluated on a case by case basis…if the individuals performance meets or exceeds expectations, you need to look at why they are leaving and put some accountability on the organization to create an environment where people don’t want to leave in the first year. This is not recruiting’s fault, yet we often bear the blame when things don’t work out in the first year.

But, the rest of the article I think is fantastic. I love the idea of evaluating the hires made…not just looking at how fast they are filled, but how well they are filled, and looking at the opinions of every individual involved in the hiring process….so that it can be seen who voted for that individual who turned out to be a star…and who didn’t see their potential.

:) Pam

Why is it that so many C Suite executives have such low expectations for value based metrics from HR? Why is it that so few staffing professionals have deployed the measurement disciplines to document the yield of their business process called staffing?

One of the biggest obstacles is lack of infrastructure. Every other core business process has made an investment in the infrastructure of data capture, storage, retrieval, analysis and reporting. There are tremendous resources for accounting, raw goods, order flow, very few well developed resources for the staffing process. ATS and CRM platforms fall short of the mark. The leading edge practitioners are building systems to meet their needs. It can be done and skillful people are doing it.

Kudos to John for keeping a range of value/contribution variables for consideration in front of the profession. Those staffing professional who document how their process contributes to a maintaining a competitive differentiation in the market will be the winners.

If a company has a performance management system (ratings, etc.) then it is not really so problematic to measure and report the data. Take that info and demonstrate some causality between talent and improved operating efficiencies, stronger revenue production, etc. and the picture snaps right into HD, 1080p resolution.

If my counterparts within the various LOB’s are rated on their impact to the business, why shouldn’t I, as a Recruiter, be evaluated on a similar measure? (think rhetorical question here folks).

As competition further escalates, his principles are going to very much come into vogue…again..and at a higher level of acceptance.

People will see that some of his principles were not as extreme as they once thought, they were simply correct.