Quality of hire is a difficult metric. We want to know if the recruiting process is actually selecting the right talent, but there are a lot of subjective factors involved. What’s more, there’s no industry standard (nor magic recipe) with which to measure—that varies from company to company depending on what is most important to them.

Although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, there are steps you can take to improve the way you measure quality of hire. Use these strategies to tailor the metric to your company and measure quality of hire with confidence:

1. Set performance objectives

Measuring quality of hire starts at the beginning of the recruiting process. That’s right — you need to be thinking about the metric as you write the job description. Develop the main performance objectives for the job to describe the position. These performance objectives are a critical part of measuring.

Your performance objectives need to be specific, so there is a concrete and clear way to measure them. A typical job description may list communication skills as a key requirement for the position. But how will those communication skills be used in the job and to what extent? Will the employee need to write certain content? Communicate regularly with clients? Deliver presentations?

Layout the specific performance objectives of the job, so you know what to look for in a candidate and how to measure their success in the position.

2. Predict quality of hire

Using the performance objectives, estimate how well you expect your new employee to perform even before their first day based on their past performance and qualifications. How will their experience and current skills help them succeed?

After the new employee starts in their position, measure their actual success in achieving the performance objectives. Did they meet your expectations? Exceed them? If the new employee performance falls below your expectations, it may signal problems with your recruiting process.

Depending on where the new employee is struggling, low performance could mean their skills didn’t match the performance objectives closely enough, the recruiting process failed to account for  company culture and working styles, or the process needs a more effective screening and evaluation process.

3. Talk to employees

Quality of hire doesn’t only rely on quality of work — employee satisfaction and cultural fit are just as important.

If you’re just looking at performance, you may think top-performing new employees are happy and engaged, and that’s not always the case. In a 2013 report conducted by Leadership IQ, low performers at the company studied were much more likely to say they were motivated to give 100 percent at work than high-performing employees.

This means your high-performing new hires aren’t necessarily engaged, and when employees aren’t engaged, it’s only a matter of time before they look for opportunities they find more exciting.

Ask employees to rate their satisfaction and engagement with the position to understand if they are truly a great fit. New employee feedback can reveal weaknesses in the recruiting process and help determine how to better select candidates who fit the culture and are passionate about the work the company does.

4. Look at the big picture

When looking at quality of hire, it’s easy to get caught up in the little details. The cost of hire, amount of hires, and time to fill look at the recruiting process but don’t effectively measure the quality of hire.

Instead, look at quality of hire in terms of meeting larger company goals. How are your new employees impacting the overall success of the company? Are they improving processes, fixing inefficiencies, increasing productivity?

This approach requires you to look at the big picture goals of the company, and the overall quality of hires, not just individual performance. After analyzing each new employee, view them as a whole to find the overall success of your recruiting process.

To get a real sense of the effectiveness of your recruiting process, you need to rethink the way you measure quality of hire. Focus on specific objectives to better evaluate the quality of candidates you bring in and to improve your recruiting process.

Written by Robyn, Melhuish.

Originally posted on talentculture.com