There’s no better feeling than biting into a ripe apple. A satisfying crunch followed by a burst of flavour and fresh juice.

By contrast, it’s almost heartbreaking when you pick the wrong apple. What appears to be a delicious, shiny treat turns out to be rotten to the core.

For the more creative amongst you, it might not be too much of a stretch to compare picking the wrong piece of fruit with making a bad hire…

For the rest of us, we have to realise that poor hiring decisions have a financial impact. A bad hire can quite literally act like a rotten apple inside your organisation, destroying your culture from within.

It’s no surprise that most talent leaders agree that quality of hire is the single most valuable metric to evaluate their team’s performance. According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends Report, quality of hire ranks as the most valuable performance KPI.

Despite the importance that talent leaders are placing on this metric, there’s no agreed industry standard measure for quality of hire. Only a minority of companies feel like they have a sound approach to measure quality of hire, and only a tiny 5% believe their tactics are best in class.

So it it’s a sound metric to use but there’s no agreed standard, where do we start? Here are three ideas:

1. Tracking staff retention

Retention is a widely used metric to measure quality of hire. A reported 49% of talent leaders use it when trying to gauge new hire quality.

The rational for using retention to measure quality of hire is simple: the longer an employee stays with a company the more value they can add to the business.

Hamilton Recruitment enjoys a 96% success rate when it comes to candidates staying on beyond their first year of hire.

You need to exercise caution, however, because lots of different factors outside the individual’s quality can impact how long they might stay. (For example, you might have an amazing hire and a terrible manager; or that great new employee might get poached by another firm, which would be no reflection on the recruiter that brought them in.)

2. Using performance reviews

Performance reviews are a frequently used method to track quality of hire.

It makes sense: if a new hire is performing well, it stands to reason that they’re high quality and that hiring them was a good idea.

Again, though, it’s not so simple: performance reviews can often be subjective, making it misleading to standardise the results: some managers are hard to please, whilst others hand out top marks to everyone.

3. Train managers to coach and mentor new hires

A useful tool in ensuring a good quality of hire outcome is to engage, motivate and incentivise new members of the team.

This can be through learning incentives, perks, appreciation, feedback and guidance on improvement.

Specifically for employers on the Islands, this process should include making new hires from abroad feel settled and welcome through providing support in areas such as work permits, finding accommodation and setting up home, personal admin (opening a local bank account, finding a doctor etc) all the way through to making sure new hires feel included in social activities in their new environment.

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