Quality of hire is the most important and most difficult metric in talent acquisition. Talent Tech Labs, a New York based incubator, introduced me to Talenytics, a software vendor that focuses on quality of hire.
For most recruiters the presenting problem is not that candidate quality is bad, it’s that the hiring manager thinks it’s bad; the manager thinks the recruiters are not presenting them with a good slate of high quality candidates.
Part of the reason for this could be that the usual focus regarding quality of hire is around assessment techniques that predict quality, or ways to get more accurate measures of performance post-hire. Herein is the source of Talenytics’ most useful insight: The starting place for improving quality of hire lies in improving the relationship and communication between hiring manager and recruiter, and I think there’s every reason to believe that that will improve quality of hire.
Their approach, embodied in the software, is to get the hiring manager to make explicit decisions around the priority of the requirements they list; for example, is experience in the industry critical, important or desirable? What about competencies? Experience in a similar role? The system won’t let the hiring manager rate everything as critical, however; it forces them to make some trade-offs. That’s a big help to recruiters in picking the candidates to shortlist, and it starts a better conversation between hiring manager and recruiter. It also provides a baseline metric so that the hiring manager can compare the quality of the candidates presented against the priorities he or she has defined, which is invaluable in assessing candidate fit.
Talenytics uses a similar method to get the hiring manager and recruiter aligned on expectations about the process, which sets the basis for a better relationship, and a more effective process.
The final step is to get some post-hire data on performance. There is no magic here; it either must come from a manager’s assessment of the new hire or, for jobs where it is available, hard numbers on performance.
A possible objection from hiring managers could be that they don’t have time to do anything more than toss a job description over the transom to a recruiter. However, when you shift the focus of responsibility and suggest to hiring managers that they can play a critical role in getting a better quality of hire (and if they don’t make an effort then they shouldn’t complain about it) and you use a mechanism (in this case software) to enable the conversation, then you are on a path to getting better involvement.
It’s funny that talent acquisition is usually totally on the hook for quality of hire when so much actually depends on the hiring manager. Putting more onus on the hiring manager, ensuring they have skin in the game, makes a lot of sense.
We normally think the value of data is that it provides insights to an individual. However, it serves an equally important role in providing a starting point for conversations between two people. Even in cases where the data itself does not tell you that much, it can provide a foundation for a conversation that wouldn’t happen, or wouldn’t as be effective, without it.
