Quality of Hire: Your Org's Top 10 Indicators

By Tom McGuire | February 24, 2025
What is "quality of hire"? Like "workforce planning", the words can stop a conversation in it's track. But neither should. Defining and measuring Quality of Hire (QoH) is a essential responsibility of any Talent Acquisition function. After all, if TA doesn't know which hires actually showed up on day one and which stayed and performed well, they simply cannot repeat the successes and avoid the hiring failures in the future. Remember, it's not about 'who get in trouble' if early attrition is on the rise, it's tracking our performance in this area and identifying ways to make hiring quality and new hire performance and potential better.
Below, we've identified the information you need to effectively measure Quality of Hire.
Quality of hire is a data-based way to measure the quality of candidates identified, screened, presented and onboarded by the organization.
10 important quality of hire indicators:
- Employee attrition
- Performance ratings
- Hiring manager survey data related to employee (NOT recruiter) performance
- Employees deemed “promotable”/ identified as a successor to a higher level job
- Compensation
- Rate of promotion
- 360-degree feedback, or other assessment, results
- Recognition received (HiPo, Emerging Talent, Nominations, etc.)
- Productivity
- Absenteeism
It is crucial to measure these indicators over a set period of time. And it's only logical to begin with a small group of employees in the most critical roles.
Again, we know that this data will not be easy to acquire, but this list is a great place to start. Once you sift through this list and determine the indicators that are most relevant and valuable to your quest to measure quality of hire, we have one more suggestion:
You should reevaluate the current processes in place to track and improve your quality of hire metrics over time.
Some recommendations:
- Make sure recruiters manually capture accurate source of hire for every new hire that starts day one with the organization (not by candidate self-selection or auto-URL tracking).
- Track the use and effectiveness of selection/assessment tools used.
- Evaluate trends among roles, functions, hiring managers, senior leaders and geographies.
- Emphasize benchmarking within your own company over time, rather than benchmarking with other companies.
- Discuss and ultimately determine responsibilities and accountabilities for quality of hire for recruiters, Human Resource generalists, people leaders and senior leaders.
We’d like to know if you have recommendations as to what your organization has used to measure QOH. Have questions about Quality of Hire? Contact us and get an immediate response.

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