Quality of Hire: How to Measure and Improve It

If you’re an HR professional, you know it’s painful to see a new hire fall flat or disappear faster than a slice of cake at an office birthday party. If you’re tired of this endless cycle of hiring and firing, measuring and improving your quality of hire (QOH) is the solution.

Quality of hire is a crucial metric demonstrating the value of every joiner’s contribution to the company’s overarching goals. The problem? Putting a numerical value on a new hire’s performance is easier said than done.

This guide walks through how to measure quality of hire using proven HR metrics like new hire attrition, employee engagement, and hiring manager satisfaction — and how to improve them using a skills-first, data-driven approach to make consistently better hires.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Quality of hire is a vital hiring metric that reflects a new employee’s value to the organization.
• Measuring and improving QOH helps hiring teams avoid the costs of a bad hire, attract top talent in a competitive market, and boost employee engagement and productivity.
• There’s no easy way to measure quality of hire. Instead, consider which recruiting metrics are most important to your team or organization and prioritize those to improve new hire success.
• Relying on a data-driven hiring process, gathering candidate feedback, and implementing a skills-based hiring process are all simple ways to improve your quality of hire metric.

What is quality of hire?

Quality of hire is a hiring metric that reflects the value a new employee brings to an organization. It encompasses the pre-hire and post-hire experience as a comprehensive way to measure how successful they’re likely to be in their role.

💥 Pre-hire quality checkers include assessment scores, work samples, and structured interviews

💥 Post-hire quality measures include time to proficiency, time to productivity, and performance metrics, such as goal achievement, project impact, or manager ratings in performance reviews.

By establishing a baseline for each quality of hire measure, you can check which factors correlate with your most successful hires to predict quality and achieve hiring success.

How to measure quality of hire

While quality of hire is a key recruiting metric, you measure it using other HR metrics. There’s no unique formula to measure quality of hire, which is why it’s often so difficult for teams to track and improve.

Generally, there is no one-size-fits-all metric for quality of hire because it depends on what your priority is. Common quality-of-hire metrics include turnover rates, job performance, employee engagement, and cultural fit measured by 360 ratings.

Ji-A Min, Research Analyst at Ideal Candidate

The bottom line is that how you calculate your overall quality of hire score depends on your needs, internal processes, and preferred outcome.

Here are eight of the most common ways — all are great starting points for measuring this metric, but you can adapt and customize the way you measure QoH depending on your organization’s needs.

Use one or more of the following:

1. End of probation

Most new hires are expected to showcase what they can offer a company within a specific period. Typically, the period to reach full productivity is three months from their start date (or 90 days), which is just long enough to evaluate the hires’ on-the-job performance and decide whether to continue employment, extend the probation period, or terminate the contract.

2. Ramp-up time for new hires

Ramp-up time refers to how long it takes new hires to reach their full potential within the organization. This will likely differ according to the department and company. In some cases, it can take up to 90 days for a new hire to reach full autonomy, or much shorter for entry-level roles.

Here are a few ways to measure ramp-up time:

☝️ Observe and take notes during the first few weeks on the job. Precise? Definitely. But it’s also pretty time-consuming.

✌️ Ask hiring managers how the new hire is doing after 30, 60, and 90 days. This is less precise but still provides valuable data for the process.

3. Acceptable productivity

This is a variation of the ramp-up time metric. It measures how long until a new hire is productive enough to work independently without assistance.

The main difference is that this metric looks at overall productivity, not just how fast someone reaches their full potential. Measure this hire score using the same methods as for ramp-up time.

We spoke to Steve O’Halloran, Talent Acquisition Lead at Embeddable, who stresses the importance of being consistent with your KPI strategies. He warns:

“A crucial and often overlooked aspect is that the criteria you use to evaluate candidates in the interview process must be tightly linked to how you evaluate their performance once they’re through the door. Hiring someone for ABC, then evaluating them against DEF once they start the job, sets nobody up for success. Hiring teams getting this right from the start will save a lot of heartache down the road.”

4. Hiring manager satisfaction rating

Hiring manager satisfaction is a vital recruitment metric that measures how satisfied the hiring manager is with the company’s hiring process and new employees. As hiring managers aren’t part of the HR department (in most cases), they can provide valuable insight into how effective the recruitment process is.

Taken a few months after the new hire starts, hiring manager satisfaction surveys optimize the recruiting process and create a better quality of hire. Crucially, they differ from candidate satisfaction, which looks at jobseekers’ experience of your talent acquisition process.

5. Job performance reviews

Performance reviews offer a formal approach to measuring quality of hire and understanding how well a new hire is doing. Usually, a hiring manager conducts these reviews and includes a score on a scale (1-5, for example) to assist in measuring quality.

For a more accurate and well-rounded performance review, incorporate 360-degree feedback from a variety of sources, such as peers, managers, direct reports, self-evaluations, and other relevant stakeholders. You’ll gain a wide range of perspectives, spot trends, and eliminate any bias.

6. Promotions

Promotions are a lagging indicator but a valuable way to measure the quality of hire. Promotion rate and promotion frequency are standard quality of hire metrics, calculated by tracking how many new hires are promoted within their first year and how often they are promoted since joining the company.

It’s a no-brainer. Quality candidates will get promoted more often and more quickly, which means that their overall quality of hire is superb.

7. Culture fit

Culture fit is notoriously hard to measure as a qualitative metric, because, company cultures are equally as hard to define. But this is still an important area of focus, as bad culture fit can significantly impact your cost per hire. Consider the following questions as part of your evaluation process:

• Does the hire uphold and adhere to the company values?
• Are they a good representation of the organization?
• Do they contribute positively to team dynamics and collaboration?

Since these are inherently subjective, the best way to gather meaningful insights is to ask the people who work with the new hire day-to-day. Send a short survey to their team and manager a few months after the start date to gauge how well they’ve integrated.

8. Employee turnover and retention rate

Turnover and retention rates show whether your new hires stick around long enough to make a meaningful impact. Start by tracking first-year turnover, or simply how many hires leave the company within the first 12 months. A high rate signals deeper issues with onboarding or role expectations.

Through a more positive lens, new hire retention rates explore how many new employees are still with the company after their first year. Both metrics highlight patterns, like certain roles, departments, or hiring managers with consistently stronger or weaker outcomes.

How to improve your quality of hire

Improving something that’s extremely difficult to measure might sound like Mission: Impossible. But once you define what quality means for your team and set clear benchmarks, it’s actually very doable.

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to build a hiring process that consistently brings in top performers, then sets them up for success. Here’s how to make that happen:

1. Define what quality of hire means for your company’s long-term success

The first step in improving the quality of hire is to sit down with your team and define what a successful hire looks like.

• What skills and experience are required?
• What are the key indicators of success?
• What qualities or traits allow someone to thrive within your team and organization?

With a clear definition, you can start measuring and improving the quality of hire.

2. Rely on a data-driven hiring process

Improving quality of hire means relying less on gut instinct — and more on real data. That includes assessment results, hiring manager feedback, candidate performance, and retention insights.

A platform like Toggl Hire helps you stay on top of the data throughout the entire hiring process. You can set pass thresholds to automatically filter out unqualified applicants, track how different hiring steps are performing, and spot patterns that lead to better hires over time.

Toggl’s insights dashboard turns raw candidate data into clear, actionable takeaways — helping your team work faster and smarter, without losing sight of what matters: hiring great people who stay and succeed.

3. Align the hiring team with the right requirements

Are your hiring managers aligned with the requirements of the role? If not, you run the risk of hiring someone who’s not a good fit for the team. This can lead to a high turnover rate and a drop in productivity.

To avoid this kind of miscommunication or misalignment, create a candidate scorecard that includes factors such as:

• Hard and soft skills
• The level of knowledge the candidate needs
• How long they’ve worked in specific or adjacent roles

Instead of relying on resumes or LinkedIn profiles, scorecards objectively measure the quality of candidates during the interview process and prevent the hiring team from acting on impulse or being influenced by their unconscious bias.

4. Use skills assessments to increase recruiter productivity

Resumes and interviews can only tell you so much. Without clear evidence of ability, recruiting teams spend too much time chasing the wrong candidates — and that slows everything down.

Skills assessments streamline the hiring process and improve recruiter productivity by showing you exactly who can do the job. Whether using pre-built tests or customizing your own, competency skills assessments give you instant clarity on candidate strengths and gaps long before the interview stage.

With Toggl Hire, for example, you can test candidates early in the funnel and get data-backed insights on who can actually do the job. With a rich test library filled with customizable tests, you can make faster, more confident hiring decisions — and reduce the risk of a bad hire.

5. Improve the onboarding experience for new hires

Let’s be honest: candidates talk to each other, and a sloppy onboarding process can have a major impact on your employer brand and other key metrics like employee retention and attrition.

To improve your onboarding experience, assess whether candidates:

• Understand your organization’s core goals and missions
• Understand the principles of how the organization works
• Receive hardware and system access promptly
• Feel welcomed by the team and their manager

Regardless of your current process or how you improve it, the goal is to help new hires adjust to their new environment and get up to speed quickly.

6. Gather feedback from former employees to improve your process

Former employees and candidates offer valuable insights into which aspects of your hiring process are working and which aren’t.

In fact, when tracking feedback from former employees, exit interviews are a must-have for any growing company. They offer valuable insight into why employees leave (and how to keep future top performers around longer).

Why is quality of hire important?

Tracking and improving quality of hire takes time, coordination, and consistent effort — but the return is undeniable. When you get it right, it directly impacts the long-term success of your business. Here’s why it’s worth prioritizing:

• Improved productivity: High-quality hires ramp up quickly and start contributing value from day one, which improves overall team efficiency.
• Lower turnover risk: When people are a great fit, they stay longer. That means fewer replacements, a lower cost per hire, and less disruption.
• Better company culture: Employees who align well with the company’s values and culture positively influence morale, teamwork, and organizational cohesiveness.
• Improved innovation: High-quality hires bring valuable skills, creativity, and fresh perspectives, fostering innovation and growth.
• Boosted employee engagement survey scores: Top talent contributes to stronger team dynamics and morale, which can lead to measurable improvements in engagement scores over time.
• Stronger employer brand: Consistently hiring the right candidates boosts your company’s reputation, attracting more top-tier talent over time.
• Cost savings: Better hires lead to fewer hiring mistakes, reducing costs associated with poor performance, rehiring, training, and lost productivity.
• Higher customer satisfaction: Quality employees deliver better services and products, leading to happier customers and improved loyalty.

Final thoughts on improving the quality of hire

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so arming yourself with the right hiring metrics is job one as a hiring manager. Investing in a good process will improve the quality of your team and lower your turnover rate. So, everybody wins.

Follow the steps and tips above to create a process that works for your business — one that sources and retains the best of the best. If you want to create better job descriptions, hire for the right skills, and attract better candidates, try a full-cycle recruitment software built for skills-first hiring. That’s right, we’re talking about Toggl Hire.

Create your free account to test the right skills, improve your time to hire, and offer a great candidate experience.