As the employment market grows increasingly competitive, employers need new tools to gauge candidates and ensure that they are investing in the right talent for their organization. It's no longer enough to hire someone with a solid resume and a good interview. You need to look deeper into the candidate pool and consider the way that each new hire will affect the company's productivity, culture, and reputation.

A toxic employee can cause significant damage to company morale and productivity. What's more, recruitment and training are expensive and time consuming, so it is critical that you direct those resources toward new hires who will provide long-term advantages both financially and culturally. Candidate quality measurements are an excellent way to ensure that you're selecting the right person for the job.

What are Candidate Quality Measurements?

Candidate quality measurements are used throughout the recruitment and hiring process, and strongly affect your overall quality of hire so it’s important to understand how to measure candidate quality. Once you have recruited a pool of candidates to choose from, you need to narrow the selection down to the individuals who are best suited for the role in question. This is where specific quality measurements come in. Using targeted metrics and real-time data analysis, you can find the most qualified candidates in your industry while considering the future impact those candidates may have on your company as a whole. 

With the right metrics and data analysis, your talent measurements can also help you assess your recruitment and hiring methods, and establish a method for tracking employee performance. By creating a consistent set of candidate measurements on a uniform index, you can capture and quantify this information in order to turn it into actionable data.

Candidate Quality Measurement Methods

Candidate quality measurement isn't just about analyzing the current employee pool. It's also about collecting critical data to establish actionable metrics that allow you to select ideal future employees. To establish usable data, there are two primary methods of measurement: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative method to measure candidates

The quantitative method of data measurement uses numerical scores and calculations to determine the suitability of a candidate for a given position. Some of the most common quantitative measurements used to assess candidate quality include: 

• Number of Candidates
• Assessments and Aptitude Tests
• Referral Rates
• Recruitment Conversion Rates
• Time to Hire
• Time to Full Productivity

Qualitative method to measure candidates

The qualitative analysis of a potential employee includes items that are easy to see but difficult to quantify, such as:

• Resume and Qualifications
• Reputation and References
• Multiple Job Offers
• Awards and Accolades
• Fit the Company Culture

Pre-Hire Metrics to Measure Candidate Quality

Candidate quality metrics pull data from both pre-hire and post-hire periods. Although the ultimate goal is to establish a long-term quality of hire system, the first step in that process is establishing a solid recruitment strategy. It's not enough to just review your previous hires for strengths and weaknesses. You need to proactively analyze the recruitment process to prevent problems that occur later. Pre-hire metrics include:

Candidate referrals or source of hire

One of the most effective ways to determine a good candidate is through referrals and reference checks, like Crosschq 360. Whether they are referred by another employee or by an external recruiting company, candidates with referrals tend to have better skills and experience. They are also essentially pre-screened by the individual or organization referring them, giving you a higher-quality candidate pool. 

Number of applications

When you analyze the number of applications and compare it to the number of candidates sent to your hiring team by recruiters, you get a good idea of the quality of candidates. If almost all of the applicants are coming to you as candidates, it may be time to revisit your recruitment methods in order to establish additional screening measures, such as phone interviews or skills assessments. 

Candidates selected to interview

Although you do want your hiring process to be selective, you also want your recruiters to be providing a large enough pool of qualified candidates to choose from. Ideally, the recruitment process is tailored to ensure that only qualified candidates make it to the interview process. This helps to save the company time and money that may otherwise be spent interviewing candidates who don't meet company standards. 

Interview-to-offer ratio

When selecting candidates for interviews, you should also consider the number of positions available. A high ratio of interviews-to-offers can harm your company's reputation and lengthen the interview process unnecessarily. Instead, take the time to review your candidates thoroughly so that you only spend time interviewing applicants who are well suited and likely to accept an offer.

Job offer conversion rate

Your job offer conversion rate is the percentage of candidates who accept offers of employment. If you have many candidates turning away job offers, you may need to modify your recruitment process. In addition, it may be wise to consider compensation, benefits, and incentives, as these factor strongly into a potential employee's decision.

Post-Hire Metrics to Measure Candidate Quality

Pre-hire metrics are necessary to ensure that your recruitment and hiring processes produce viable candidates. Post-hire metrics follow those candidates after the hiring process. After you've hired your new employee, you need a method by which you can establish roles and responsibilities, create goals, and track employee performance. Post-hire metrics include: 

Performance reviews 

Performance reviews are one of the most common methods of tracking employee success within a role. Using a standardized rating method, you can incorporate performance reviews into your overall candidate quality measurements. To avoid overly subjective reviews, you can use specific performance metrics to provide clearer objectives, such as:

• Comparative Ranking of New Hires
• Average Commission or Bonus Earnings
• Error Tracking 

Employee retention and turnover

Employee retention is at the same time one of the easiest and most difficult methods of gauging recruitment success. As a candidate quality measurement, retention numbers can be useful to determine value added to the company through tenure. The longer an employee is with the company, the more value they contribute. However, there are many things outside the recruitment process that can cause a quality hire to leave, from management conflicts to personal issues.

It is, therefore, necessary to narrow the data pertaining to employee turnover in order to accurately determine candidate quality. To use retention as a metric for candidate quality assessment, consider the following: 

• Turnover for Critical Positions
• Turnover of Top Performers
• New Hire Turnover Rates

How Candidate Quality Measurements Benefit Your Organization

When you use candidate quality measurements, you streamline the hiring process, increase productivity, and attract better candidates. By incorporating real-time data and analysis, you allow your recruiters and hiring managers to establish the same goals and modify processes as necessary to ensure that you are attracting and hiring quality employees for your company. 

The advantages of incorporating these measurements are myriad and include:

• Clear Expectations: With clear quality metrics and measurement methods in place, your hiring and recruitment teams can operate with the same goals and expectations. This reduces the potential for misunderstandings, thereby enhancing efficiency and eliminating unnecessary interviews, for greater cost savings.
  
  
• Enhanced Productivity: Clear candidate measurements allow recruiters to work confidently toward finding the right client. This increases productive recruitment activities and improves the quality of candidates presented to the hiring team. 
  
  
• Higher Quality Candidates: Standardized quality measurements allow you to create more specific job descriptions that address the desires and concerns of high-quality candidates. With clearly outlined job duties, challenges, and opportunities for growth, quality candidates are more likely to apply.
  
  
• Reduced Hiring and Retention Costs: When you use standardized quality measurements to tailor your operations to attract top performers, you don't have to pay higher wages. Quality employees will appreciate job growth opportunities and will require fewer wage increases to remain with the company.
  
  
• Top-Performing Managers: Clear expectations and goals provided by candidate measurements allow managers to better handle their responsibilities. 
  
  
• Competent and Motivated Employees: With focused candidate measurements, you will attract higher-quality employees who have the knowledge, experience, and motivation to fulfill their roles. 
  
  
• Reduced Turnover: These measurements also help you keep employees motivated and engaged, further reducing turnover.

Incorporating candidate quality measurements is crucial to improving your quality of hire. Instead of subjectively selecting employees based on resumes, interviews, and job performance reviews, you can use standardized ratings and calculations to improve your recruitment and hiring strategies. The aim of these candidate measurements is to have methods in place that allow you to hire quality employees that give more value to the organization than they take. 

Establish Actionable Candidate Quality Measurements With Crosschq

Create useful quality measurements with data analytics and AI technology from Crosschq. You can rely on Crosschq to complete your reference checks, screening, assessments, interviews, and onboarding through the use of state-of-the-art quality measurement software. Crosschq 360 talent acquisition software and data-driven analytics will help you streamline your recruitment and hiring strategies.

For more information about Crosschq, contact us today to schedule a free demo.