‘Quality of Fill’ an Emerging Recruitment Metric

Recruiting ideal employees is one of the best things you can do to contribute to the success and competitive well-being of your company.

So, as president of a business that specializes in helping companies find the “right fit” for key professional-level job vacancies, I recently commissioned a survey to uncover best practices when it comes to the most useful metrics for measuring—and optimizing—corporate recruiting effectiveness.

What we found was partly surprising and absolutely exciting.

The surprising part is that not all companies have metrics or measurement processes in place that help them recruit more effectively. Further, most of the companies that use metrics are measuring the process of recruitment, as opposed to the true impact of recruitment on their businesses. While process metrics such as “time to fill” and “cost per hire” certainly are useful, our research indicates that a metric is emerging that may be far more useful.

More specifically, our research among corporate recruiters and hiring managers indicates that these process metrics falls short because they don’t measure the quality and business impact of the final product—the individual that is hired. Simply, they fail to measure the value that new hires contribute to the organization over time.

Here’s the exciting part of our survey: A growing number of companies are pioneering a new recruitment metric called “quality of fill.” This emerging metric measures the more meaningful—and strategic—contribution of good hires as opposed to hires who fail to deliver as promised.

Quality of fill is where the cutting-edge work is being done in recruitment metrics. It’s where recruiters and HR executives can take their game to the next level and get the visibility and the seat at the table they so richly deserve.

Quality-of-fill pioneers talk about five key factors to consider in defining quality:

• Employee retention
• Performance evaluations
• The number of first-year hires who make it into high-potential programs
• Employee promotions
• New-hire surveys

Another quality calculation in play is modeled after the popular net promoter score for customer satisfaction (which simply subtracts the number of a company’s detractors from the number of its promoters to determine the net promoter score). The quality-of-fill version is called the “net quality score.” Net quality score is simply the sum of all hires in the last year, minus those who scored in the bottom half of all employees at their first performance review.

The bottom line is, best practices in quality-of-fill metrics are emerging rapidly. I strongly encourage recruiters and HR executives to closely monitor and start to experiment with quality-of-fill metrics.

You know better than anyone that the quality of your new hires affects your entire organization. In my view and the view of a number of your peers, quality of fill can and will play an important role in increasing both recruiting quality and the strategic role of recruiters and hiring managers.

Workforce Management Online, June 2010 — Register Now!