Can quality of hire be measured and improved?

By: Rebecca Käppeler, VP, Operations Excellence, RPO, KellyOCG®

“We need to do a better job hiring the right people.” It's a refrain heard just as often from prospective clients today as it was ten years ago.

Quality of hire remains a stubborn problem because of a simple and maddeningly true cliche: You can't improve what you can't measure. And after decades of trying, most organizations can’t confidently measure quality of hire.

The reasons are simple. Quality of hire isn't one number. It involves a combination of measures, and the data associated with them often exist in different systems. Clients turn to us for guidance and technology to tap into data from different sources, but integrating data does not account for the most challenging element: Measuring quality takes time. The 30/60/90-day performance rating cannot be compressed. And the benchmarks any measurement requires only become meaningful after many data points accumulate. Until then, you won’t know what “good” looks like.

And so, when someone asks me if quality of hire can be measured and improved, I have a surprising answer: Yes.

Here’s how:

1. Determine what quality means to your organization.
2. Identify the metrics you can realistically track today.
3. Define what characteristics you should be measuring and building over time.
4. Connect metrics to actions you can take today, and to adjustments you can make down the road.

Sounds simple, right? Of course, it isn’t. Behind each of those steps is a course of action that requires patience and a willingness to take a hard look at your organization and the people it values. It takes truly experienced human guidance to connect measurement to action, and action to impact. No single formula can do it, and, as of today, AI cannot automate the combination of measurement and improvement.

The good news is that companies are tackling the quality of hire challenge. We see it happen with our own clients, and it makes a difference. To understand what’s involved, turn each of those steps into a question.

Step 1: What do you actually mean by a quality hire?

Before you can measure quality of hire, you must decide what it means in your organization — and that answer varies more than most people expect. A company hiring seasonal sales staff measures it differently than one searching for biomedical engineers. A high-volume distribution operation has different quality signals than a professional services firm filling senior roles.

In our work with clients, we consistently see gaps between quality expectations and real-world needs. Take time-to-productivity as an example. One new hire is doing the work they were hired to do two weeks after starting. Another is still in training and immersion at six weeks. For less skilled or non-senior roles, faster is better. For senior or highly skilled roles, earlier independence doesn't necessarily signal quality — that person may be working independently before fully grasping all aspects of the role.

Context, in other words, determines what the metric means. The same logic applies when an organization complains that candidates arrive with too little industry experience, equating familiarity with quality. In many IT roles, where the knowledge being sought is largely industry-agnostic, that emphasis actively reduces quality where it should count most.

There is no universal definition for quality of hire. Defining it requires understanding your industry, your hiring profile, your retention dynamics, and your business goals before you can decide which metrics are worth tracking.

Step 2: What can you measure now?

When someone asks how they can track and improve quality of hire, they don't mean next year. They want something to show now. The good news is that you don't have to fly blind for months before starting to track quality.

We can start with classic metrics right now, but with one caveat: Treat them as a first step, and commit to a plan that expands what you track — and, with it, the context that makes your quality metrics meaningful over time. We want metrics we can capture and do something about.

For most organizations, early post-hire indicators are the most accessible starting point. These include:

• Early attrition — turnover within the first 30, 60, or 90 days is a fast signal that something went wrong, whether in the hire itself, onboarding, or both.
• Hiring manager satisfaction — a structured survey at 30 or 90 days captures a subjective, but valuable, read on whether the new hire meets expectations.
• Offer acceptance rate and time-to-fill — these speak to the quality of the recruitment process itself and the caliber of candidates being surfaced.
• Candidate experience scores — a rough indicator of how the process is perceived, which often correlates with downstream engagement.

It's important to call these metrics what they are: indicators of recruiting quality, not necessarily true quality of hire. They can tell you something about how the process performed. And even as recruiting performance indicators, they should be considered carefully — as other factors can influence them, too. In any case, they’re useful, but they don’t tell you whether this person will be a strong contributor over time.

That distinction matters. As an RPO or TA partner, we often have access to early data points, but visibility into what happens deeper in the organization falls into the employer’s hands. Performance reviews, promotions, and long-term engagement will come into view well after the time of hire. That data lives in client systems. Acting on what's accessible now is still valuable — just don't mistake it for the full picture.

Step 3: What should you build over time?

True quality of hire is a composite that comes into view over the long term. No single metric captures it. The most robust approaches combine objective data with subjective feedback, measured consistently over time:

• Performance ratings at 30/60/90 days and annually
• Time to full productivity (ramp-up time)
• Retention at one year (and beyond)
• Employee and manager engagement scores
• Promotion rate and velocity
• Business impact metrics where measurable — revenue, project outcomes, error rates

Beware of jumping into formulas. A common simplification is to express it as a simple, linear formula: quality of hire = (performance + retention + engagement + hiring manager satisfaction) / number of factors.

That formula is a useful organizing principle, but it can obscure as much as it reveals. Retention, for example, can drop for reasons entirely unrelated to whether the hire was good: poor onboarding, ineffective management, a toxic team dynamic, or a pay disparity that surfaces six months in. A person who was an excellent hire may still leave — and a person who stays for years may not be performing.

Quality of hire isn't the same as quality of talent; it's the intersection of the right talent, in the right environment, with the right support. Building toward this longer-term view requires patience, consistency, and systems that can bring multiple data sources together. Organizations that do it well typically start small — two or three agreed-upon metrics, measured rigorously — and expand from there.

Step 4: What actions can realistically move the needle?

Measurement without action is just scorekeeping. Once you have data, the question is: What do you do with it? The answer depends on your individual situation. The outside view of an expert consulting or solutions partner is almost a necessity here, because they have experience diagnosing the situation and know which strategies succeed.

For example, we work with a large distribution and services client that depends heavily on reliable talent to take on demanding work, with little room for vacancies and turnover. They wanted to break out of status quo recruiting, expand their reach, and maximize reliability in their hires.

To get there, we built a strategy around several interlocking approaches: mapping competitors and the broader labor market, expanding focus to adjacent industries with transferable skills, and shifting to always-on pipelining rather than reactive sourcing. We layered in phased prioritization based on demand and hiring difficulty, CRM enrichment for better candidate identification, retention risk monitoring to get ahead of future needs, and enhanced market intelligence to sharpen targeting decisions.

Shifting from reactive sourcing toward a more deliberate, data-driven model made a measurable difference.

Over the course of a year, more than 90% of sourced hires came from outside the client’s industry. Conversion ratios improved across every stage of the funnel, hiring manager utilization of sourced candidates increased significantly, and sourced hire volume more than doubled year over year. These are recruiting metrics, as early results will be, but they show how a targeted change sets the stage for higher-quality talent over time.

A business cannot afford to be a lab and test each adjustment in isolation. However, even with multiple simultaneous adjustments, consistent metric tracking lets the organization spot quality issues early and address them precisely.

Start with what's real today.

There is no magic to improving quality of hire. But there is a clear path: Define it, measure it realistically, build toward a more complete picture over time, and act on what the data tells you.

The organizations that get this right don't do it all at once. They start with the questions their data can already answer and build from there. As an RPO provider, we bring deep expertise and guidance and align recruiting strategy with your goals. But ownership of quality belongs to the employer, since they have control over the employee experience.

Get intentional about establishing the goals that matter and commit to the journey. The stakes are significant, and success is within reach.