What is quality of hire?
Quality of hire is a measure of how much value a new employee brings to the organisation. It answers the question every other metric avoids: was this a good hire?
In LinkedIn's Global Recruiting Trends report, recruiting leaders named it the most valuable metric. Most companies measured it through retention, hiring manager satisfaction and new-hire performance.
Why is there no standard formula?
Because good means something different for every role. A support engineer and a programme manager are not judged on the same outcomes. Even ISO's technical specification on quality of hire, part of the ISO 30414 family, offers a range of options rather than a single method.
The practical consequence: compare quality of hire within a role family over time, not across the whole company in one number.
How is quality of hire different from a performance review?
A performance review judges the person. Quality of hire judges the recruitment decision. The same review score can mean the process worked, or that the role was easier than the brief suggested.
That is why the useful version links the outcome back to how the person was hired: which source, which assessment, which shortlist. Without that link, it is a performance statistic with a recruitment label.
What does quality of hire reward, and what can go wrong?
In principle it rewards good decisions, which is why everyone wants it. In practice it arrives six to twelve months after the hire, too late to steer the search that produced it. Teams therefore manage the metrics they can see now, such as time to hire and cost per hire.
The workable compromise is a few early signals agreed in advance: is the person productive at three months, would the manager hire them again, are they still there at one year. Sparagus asks for this feedback on permanent placements because it is the only honest test of a search.
