How to Improve Your Quality of Hire—Starting with Your Interviewing Tools

Any good recruiter knows that success isn’t just filling roles quickly or having a big talent pipeline—it’s about making quality hires that can hit the ground running and make big strides for your organization.

But how do you ensure quality of hire while juggling a lot of open roles, onboarding processes, and networking to keep that talent pipeline full? Read on for some key strategies that can help. 

What Is Quality Of Hire?

Quality of hire is a measurement of the value a new hire brings to your company. You can calculate it by evaluating metrics like employee performance, feedback from their manager and peers, turnover rate, and the new hire’s perspective on your company. See this article for ways to calculate each of these recruitment metrics.

It’s a complicated calculation, which is why only a third of companies feel they’re measuring it effectively—even though it’s consistently ranked as one of the most important success metrics in recruiting. Using data tracking advanced reporting can help, but many of the values require deeper understanding of your employees and frequent conversations to set goals & expectations.

Why Is Measuring Quality Of Hire Important? 

Understanding your quality of hire empowers your team to objectively evaluate the efficacy of your recruiting programs. This, in turn, enables your team to spotlight opportunities for improvement and prioritize consistently successful skills and qualities in future hires. Tracking your hiring data goes hand in hand with using a structured interview process & avoiding hiring bias when screening – so make sure you’re well versed in all these things to maximize quality of hire.

How To Improve Quality Of Hire Using Virtual Interviews

No recruiting workflow is always perfect. There’s always room to improve and evolve. A key place to start is in the interviewing process. This is where first impressions are made and candidates are most intentionally evaluated for their culture fit.

Virtual interviews can help not only reach a larger talent pool and improve candidate experience, but improve your quality of hire as well. Here are some ideas on how to leverage video interviewing platforms to improve

Measure Your Current Quality Of Hire

Because this metric is firmly rooted in what success looks like for each organization, almost everyone calculates it a little differently. And that’s okay—some metrics apply to one company and not the next. 

Your general formula for calculating quality of hire should look like this:

Quality of Hire = (Metric 1 % + Metric 2 % + Metric 3 % + …) / (Total number of metrics)

These metrics might include any or all of the following stats:

• Performance review data: how many new hires meet their goals?
• Engagement data: how many new hires are participating in onboarding activities?
• Feedback: How many new hires are commended by their new colleagues?
• Turnover: How many new hires are still with the company at certain milestones?

Get creative with which metrics make the most sense to include. How is success measured at the individual performance level in your company? What about the team or department level? Use these insights to normalize your quality of hire measurements against the common language of your organization.

Once this formula is defined, calculate it quarterly or biannually to evaluate new hires—and use that information to understand broader trends.

One more thing: You don’t have to do all this on your own! Leveraging the right recruiting software gives you tools that help calculate your quality of hire and frequently check in on your trends. For example, interviewstream can help you easily access all of your hiring data and benchmark your performance against industry standards.

Write Thoughtful Job Descriptions

Attracting the right talent helps net you applicants that will have great quality of hire. Sharing an accurate, impactful, and exciting job description is critical, because it’s the first touchpoint you’ll have with your candidates. 

We know that candidates’ decision-making is heavily influenced by their perceptions of an organization’s values and culture. And, those perceptions are often formed before they ever talk to anyone from the organization. This is part of the reason your job descriptions are so crucial to your recruiting success. The other, of course, is ensuring that you’re clearly articulating what skills and experience you need in the ideal candidate for a certain role.

AI Recruitment Assist tools give you a head start in drafting job descriptions that are unique to each role and who you are as a company. The tool allows you to customize job descriptions based on abilities, industry, and role. 

Review Your Screening Process

Make sure your screening practices are efficient and candidate friendly. Review screening questions to truly help you get to know candidates and figure out if they are a good culture fit for your team. 

Use your interviewing software to engage in screenings with flexibility and accuracy. For example, one-way video interviews can simplify your scheduling and ensure memorable first impressions for everyone; they’re also recorded, so you can share those first-hand insights on a candidate directly with hiring managers.

AI in your interviewing software can also help with generating helpful interview questions to make the best possible use of everyone’s time during the screening stage.

Pre-Employment Assessments For Volume Hiring

Some employers add assessments or tests to their hiring process, to objectively measure aptitude and personality among applicants and analyze their potential fit accordingly. This can be especially helpful in improving your quality of hire if your volume of applicants is huge, your recruiting team is small, or you simply have a lot of high-quality candidates and need to quickly evaluate them in an objective manner.

These types of tests can help you evaluate skills, as well as potential and cultural fit, and provide deeper insights into your candidates than a resume and cover letter alone. Integrating video interviews into this process can help you build an insightful picture of each top candidate, which can help guide you and your hiring manager through the decision-making process.

Improve Your Onboarding Experience

The usefulness of your investment in video interviewing software doesn’t have to end with an accepted offer! A good onboarding plan is essential to retention—in fact, done well, it can improve retention by 82%. And achieving better retention is a huge component of achieving better quality of hire.

You can leverage the video interviewing software you already have to offer on-demand trainings, host feedback sessions, check in on new employees, and much more. Read this article for some ideas on how to get started.

Using Virtual Interviews To Improve Your Quality Of Hire

The journey toward improving quality of hire takes place one step at a time—and if you’ve invested in the right interviewing tools, many of those steps can be simpler than you’d think! Use them to evaluate the success of your recruiting practices and identify low-hanging fruit to help you level up and have a brighter impact on your organization.

Read on to find out what you need to do to measure quality of hire – complete with calculations! If you’re interested in seeing how interviewing technology can help you hire better employees, schedule a chat with us!

About The Author

Caroline Chessia is the Marketing Operations Specialist at interviewstream. She loves color-coordinated graphs, hiking in the mountains, and every dog she meets—especially the Golden Retrievers.