Quality of hire
Also called: QoH, hire quality
Why it’s hard to measure
The problem is that you only know whether a hire was good 12-18 months after they started. By then:
- Memory of the hiring process is dim.
- The hire’s performance has been shaped by onboarding and management, not just selection.
- Many of the things you’d want to measure are subjective.
Most “quality of hire” scores in practice are loose composites. That’s better than not measuring it — but treat the number as directional, not exact.
What goes into the composite
The standard ingredients:
- First-year performance rating from the manager. Often a 1-5.
- Retention through the 12-month mark. Binary or scored.
- Manager satisfaction with the hire. Often a separate “would you hire them again” question.
- Time to productivity: how long until the new hire was independently productive.
Weight them however you like — there’s no consensus formula. The discipline is consistency: same weights across all hires.
How to use the metric
Two useful patterns:
- Compare by source channel: which channel produces the best hires. Often this surprises teams — referrals tend to outperform paid sourcing, even at SMB scale.
- Compare by interview pattern: hires who came through stages X, Y, Z vs. those who skipped stage Y. Reveals which stages are predictive.
Don’t compare quality of hire to time-to-hire as a primary KPI. They optimize against each other — speed kills quality if you push too hard.
Where Join fits
Join keeps the candidate’s hiring record after they’re hired, attached to their employee record in the HRIS. The quality-of-hire signal feeds back into source-channel reporting. See the features page.
