Quality of hire, quantified — how to define and measure a historically complex metric.

Oh great, another quality of hire article.

Well, yes. And no.

It’s true that this is literally another article on quality of hire. You got me there. But it’s not just another article on quality of hire. Because after years of theories and opinions and playing an industry-wide game of hot potato (no you should own quality of hire, no you should), I’m going to show you how we can finally move quality of hire out of the realm of opinion and into the realm of evidence.

Look, quality of hire has always lived in that uncomfortable space between obviously important and frustratingly vague. That vagueness has consequences. When something isn’t clearly defined or measured, it rarely gets managed well. And in hiring, poor management is expensive.

We set out to change that. And, ultimately, to transform quality of hire into what it was always meant to be — the essential hiring metric that helps organizations drive positive business outcomes consistently and repeatedly. So we partnered with leading industrial-organizational psychologists to answer a deceptively simple question: Can quality of hire be defined, measured at scale, and shown to matter to the business?

The short answer is yes. And the long answer is where things get interesting.

A simple framework for defining quality of hire.

Quality of hire is a latent concept, meaning you can’t observe it directly the way you can observe time-to-fill or cost-per-hire. Instead, you infer it from outcomes that show up after someone starts the job.

Historically, that’s been the problem. Post-hire outcomes live in different systems, belong to different stakeholders, and often aren’t tracked consistently. Recruiting owns the hire. Managers own performance. HR owns retention. Learning owns development. By the time the dust settles, the signal is lost.

That fragmentation has led many organizations to default to proxies like engagement scores or hiring manager satisfaction surveys. Useful? Sometimes. Predictive of business results? Not reliably.

To make quality of hire measurable, we needed three things:

• A clear theoretical model
• Observable, objective indicators
• Validation against real business outcomes
  

Now what about definitions? Quite simply, we define quality of hire as the value a new employee creates after joining the organization. It is a function of selecting candidates using data that predicts post-hire outcomes such as job performance and retention. In other words, ensuring selection decisions are based on job relevant attributes.

In our research, we operationalized that idea using three measurable dimensions that show up consistently across roles, companies, and industries:

• Enrollment. Do new hires stay past the first year? Early retention tells us whether the hiring process and onboarding experience set people up for success, or quietly pushed them out.
• Commitment. Do they stay long enough to fully contribute? Longer-term retention (12–36 months) reflects sustained performance, fit, and mutual value creation between employee and employer.
• Achievement. Do they grow? Promotions, peer recognition, and learning milestones signal that new hires are not just staying, but advancing and contributing beyond baseline expectations.

These dimensions of quality of hire aren’t theoretical abstractions. They are observable outcomes that show up in real career data.

Turning public data into a predictive hiring signal.

Using publicly available LinkedIn data, we analyzed over 3.8 million new hires across nearly 500 Fortune 500 companies over a five-year period. From this, we built a standardized metric called the Quality of Hire Index (QHI) — a score from 0 to 100 that reflects how effectively organizations convert hiring decisions into lasting employee value.

Then came the critical test: Does this index actually matter? Oh, yeah. In fact, we found that QHI directly correlates with year-over-year revenue growth:

• Just a one-point increase in QHI is associated with approximately 0.14% higher revenue growth.
• For the median Fortune 500 company, that equates to roughly $1.9 million in additional annual revenue.
• The gap between top- and bottom-performing companies within the same industry averages about 18 QHI points.
• Closing even part of that gap corresponds to meaningful growth — often north of $30 million per year.
  

On the flip side, one of the more surprising findings from the research was what didn’t correlate with revenue growth. Employee engagement ratings and “best places to work” rankings showed little to no relationship with revenue performance. That doesn’t mean engagement isn’t important. It is. But engagement reflects how people feel. Quality of hire reflects what people do over time.

The two are related — but not interchangeable.

It’s funny, because HR and TA departments have long waged turf wars over who should be owning quality of hire. This data above finally settles the score. And it turns out quality of hire isn’t an HR or TA metric at all.

It’s a business metric. And everyone should own it, including your CEO.

Business leaders can drive quality of hire.

If you’re a CEO or CFO, the implication is straightforward: hiring is one of the few levers that influences growth, culture, and cost simultaneously. If you’re a talent leader, the message is empowering: quality of hire can be measured, benchmarked, and improved using sound science. And if you’re tired of debating definitions, that might be the best news of all.

Quality of hire doesn’t have to be mysterious or complicated anymore. With the right framework and the right data, it becomes something far more useful: a leading indicator of business success.

I believe that when hiring decisions are grounded in evidence rather than intuition, everyone wins — the company, the hiring team, and most importantly, the people being hired.