The quality of those not hired is the most valuable recruiting metric that you have never heard of! It informs you how often your organizations is failing to hire the highest quality applicants.
A few years back I was advising a Fortune 100 firm that had a painfully slow and somewhat arrogant hiring process. To demonstrate the negative impact of their process I had to prove to a skeptical senior manager that they were letting top candidates get away. I asked a manager hiring for an important job to rank, in order of quality, 100 applicants who had been sourced for the role. The chosen rank was discretely written on the back of paper copies of the candidate’s resumes. Months after the role had been filled, the manager was asked if they were satisfied with the hire. He was, and felt quite certain that he had successfully hired a “top 5” candidate. After hearing of his satisfaction I had him look at the initial rank he had provided the candidate who was later hired: 75.
You can imagine his shock when he realized that the hiring process had somehow let every single one of the top-ranked applicants that the firm had prided itself in hiring “every single time” slip away. Clearly the quality of the people who they didn’t hire was significantly higher than the quality of the one that they did.
Most organizations adopt metrics based on those covered by benchmark reports or that can be easily enabled via their technology providers, instead of determining what they need to discover or prove. As a result, many organizations are burdened with data and reports that offer little in the way of guidance helping them improve their effectiveness. One metric often not fully taken advantage of is quality of hire, which I estimate less than 40% of organizations even attempt to use. Even fewer use the quality of hire derivative, quality of those not hired, because it can very quickly demonstrate how poorly a process performs.
During an advisory conversation with a recruiting leader at a well-known social networking firm experiencing difficulty achieving hire diversity, I asked “at what step or stage is your recruiting process failing?” I wasn’t surprised when he responded “we don’t actually know, we just know that the overall recruiting process is not producing the results we need.” Like many organizations, this organization lacked well-thought-out metrics that enable both performance reporting and process diagnostics.
Recruiting processes fail because either they do not attract enough top-quality candidates up front, or they fail to accurately identify, assess, and sell those attracted on the job at later stages in the process. Most organizations focus heavily on measuring sourcing effectiveness, but ignore the later stages of the process altogether. One benefit of using a “quality of those not hired” metric is that it focuses exclusively on the back end, where I estimate at least 50% of those organizations not meeting their goals have problems. If you doubt that the problem is post-attraction, ask your favorite agency or executive recruiter what percentage of qualified candidates are lost due to slow or ineffective actions on the part of hiring managers and corporate recruiting processes.
One of the purposes of the quality-of-those-not-hired metric is to force organizations with a high percentage of quality hires slipping away to identify where in their process the talent opts out or gets dropped. There are six post application stages where firms lose top candidates, including:
Since the goal of a good metric is to help you identify what is not working, carefully select and implement at least one metric that can point out failures occurring during the latter stages of your recruiting process.
A quality-of-those-not-hired metric can become cumbersome if it attempts to categorize the quality of every applicant who doesn’t get hired. In order to save time and money, narrow your focus to the strategic issue of “what happened to the cream of the crop?” Out of 50 applicants for a single job, there might only be three who were so qualified that a hiring manager would actually regret failing to hire them. I call these individuals “regrettable misses,” and it is these folks that the quality-of-those-not-hired metric aims to highlight.
If you decide to implement a quality-of-those-not-hired metric, there are several action steps to consider, including:
Here is a sample report illustrating what a recruiting leader or hiring manager might see.
Job Family: ASIC Engineer
Report Period: Q3 2010
Hire Volume: 53
| Metric | Job Family | Organization |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage of top candidates in finalist pool | 53% | 52% |
| Party responsible for removal from consideration | ||
| –candidate filtered out by recruiting process | 17% | 48% |
| –candidate opted out of recruiting process | 83% | 52% |
| Percentage of top candidates who rejected offer | 95% | 22% |
| Percentage of hires from top candidate slate | 31% | 42% |
| Process stage contributing largest slate loss | Interview Scheduling |
Candidates reported that more often than not interviews would need to be rescheduled because times initially proposed were no longer available upon confirmation. Many candidates reported that it took recruiting coordinators longer than a week to confirm meeting dates and times. Solution:
If you were a competitive fisherman participating in a pro fishing tournament and you repeatedly landed prize-winning fish, you would be justifiably proud. However, if you repeatedly caught prize contenders but lost them prior to tournament completion, wouldn’t you want to know exactly where and why you kept losing them? That is exactly what the “quality-of-those-not-hired” metric tells you. It reports how often you successfully land a great applicant, but fail to convert them to employee. Your organization can’t attain the highest level of new hire on-the-job performance (quality of hire) if your process allows the highest-quality applicants to be missed.
