Quality of hire

Quality of hire estimates how good a company's hiring decisions turn out to be, typically by combining signals such as performance review ratings, hiring-manager satisfaction, ramp time to full productivity, and whether the new hire is still employed after a set period, often one year.

There is no single industry-standard formula, unlike time to hire, which is a simple date difference; organizations build their own weighted index from the inputs available to them, and definitions vary enough that the metric is rarely comparable across companies. This makes it harder to benchmark than most recruiting metrics, but more directly tied to business outcomes than counting hires or measuring process speed alone.

Quality of hire is used to evaluate whether recruiting is optimizing for the right thing: a team that hires quickly but produces hires who leave within a year, raising employee turnover rate, has a speed problem masking a quality problem. It is often reviewed alongside early employee engagement scores for new starters, and feeds back into workforce planning by showing which sourcing channels or interview panels reliably produce hires who perform and stay.