Welcome to the first post in our Quality of Hire Fast-Track Blog Series!

Quality of Hire has become the holy grail of recruiting, yet the data proves that a lot of smart people and companies are still getting it dead wrong.

What can Quality of Hire tell us? How can you predict it?

Our data scientist team at Crosschq Data Labs analyzed 24+ million hiring decisions to show recruiting professionals and hiring managers the power of Quality of Hire, and unearthed five new and shocking insights to help you predict QoH.

Taking note of these unexpected learnings and considering their impact on your own hiring strategy can be transformative for your talent pipeline. Studying Quality of Hire will lead you to ask the following questions:

• Are you leaning too much on sourcing channels that fail to deliver quality candidates?
• How good are your screening and interviewing processes at filtering candidates?
• Are your recruiting patterns showing that you consistently make hires who don't stay long or who negatively impact productivity or team morale?
• Does your internal data reveal discrepancies between pre-hire predictions and post-hire performance?

What you find from asking these questions may surprise you. Our research uncovered some unexpected findings and turned a lot of age-old recruiting assumptions on their heads. 

Here are the top 5 insights from Crosschq’s first annual Q (Quality of Hire) report:

Insight 1: Most Interviewers Are Not Very Good at Predicting Quality of Hire.

Interviewing is weighted heavily in hiring decisions, but it’s actually a fairly unreliable way to choose the best candidate. How skilled are your stakeholder interviews? Most interviewers are not skilled or experienced at the task, and this can negatively impact recruitment outcomes. In Crosschq Data Labs research, more than half of interviewers surveyed had only completed one isolated interview, and 76% conducted only one interview per year. 

Conclusion: Interview scores are generally not very predictive of post-hire success. Interviewer skills and ability to assess quality for hire varies widely.. 

Action: Read and apply our 5 Stages of a Productive Interview to improve interviewer technique and QoH results.

Insight 2: Many Pre-Hire Assessments Are Unreliable for Predicting Quality of Hire.

As we continued our research, Crosschq Data Labs found that 6 out of 10 assessments analyzed were not predictive of Quality of Hire. In fact, 92% of the candidates who had top tier scores from one assessment later had the lowest Quality of Hire rankings overall. 

Conclusion: Pre-hire assessments only go so far: while specific tests might be able to show a candidate’s proficiency or knowledge, overall you cannot depend on them to assure Quality of Hire.

Action: Learn more about what pre-hire-assessments can and can’t do, then ensure that you count them as only one factor out of many when it comes to making hiring decisions. 

Insight 3: “Last In, First Out” Can Lead to Disastrous Downsizing Decisions. 

Conducting layoffs based solely on tenure is not the best strategy when it comes to preserving Quality of Hire in your organization. Crosschq Data Labs found in some cases that employees terminated had a 15% higher Quality of Hire ranking than those retained.

Conclusion: How long an employee has been with your organization may have little to no correlation with their current performance, future potential impact or Quality of Hire scores.

Action: Regularly assess all employees using the Crosschq Quality of Hire Scorecard to assess QoH, so you can retain your best employees when you have to lay people off.

Insight 4: Internal Referrals Are NOT The Best Source of New Hires.

According to Crosschq Data Labs, employees sourced through internal referrals have Quality of Hire scores that are 26% below the mean. This was one of the most surprising insights, as it contradicted decades of recruitment tradition that insisted internal referrals were the top source of hire. 

Conclusion: As it turns out, internal referrals may help speed up hiring, but you can’t count on that referred hire sticking around or being the right fit more than external hires. In addition, favoring internal referrals may restrict your talent pool, which could mean missing out on the opportunity to further build diversity. 

Action: Maintain the same rigorous hiring process for internal hires that you have in place for external ones, and widen your candidate sources to find and hire high-value employees.

Insight 5: When You’re Good, You’re Very, Very Good, But When You’re Bad, You’re Horrid.

Crosschq Data Labs research shows that companies that are good at Quality of Hire, are really good, while companies that are bad at Quality of Hire, are really quite bad, indeed. 

The average Quality of Hire measures at 73.0, with top tier companies ranking in at 81.4 and lower performing companies trailing at a meager 58.9 QoH Score.

Conclusion: Understanding and working toward improving Quality of Hire means defining once and for all what a “good candidate” and a “good employee” means for your organization. Once you know how to weigh these factors, you can score employees and candidates accurately and meaningfully.

Action: Track Quality of Hire using as many employee inputs as possible, using each as a lever for improving your Quality of Hire overall. With 80 pre-built reports, Crosschq Analytics helps with Quality of Hire tracking, management, and optimization. 

These surprising insights prove that hiring the best talent just doesn’t happen when companies depend on preconceived assumptions or outdated methods. Tracking post-hire data and aligning QoH insights with hiring processes could be a game-changer for many organizations. 

Not sure where to start? See our next article in our Quality of Hire Fast-Track Series: How to Calculate Quality of Hire

Quality of Hire Fast-Track Series: Everything You Need to Know

1. 5 Game-Changing Insights Into Quality of Hire (this article)
2. How to Calculate Quality of Hire in 4 Easy Steps
3. Taking Action to Reap the Benefits of Quality of Hire
4.  Ignoring Quality of Hire: What Could Go Wrong? 
5.  Quality of Hire Metrics & Trends to Track