Quality of hire (QoH) is the recruiting metric that answers the question: did we actually hire the right person? Speed and cost metrics matter, but they are ultimately instrumental — valuable only insofar as they enable or result in high-quality hires. An organisation that is fast and cheap at hiring but consistently selects underperformers is not operating an effective talent acquisition function.
Quality of hire is typically calculated as a composite score incorporating several inputs: performance rating at 90 days or 6 months, retention (whether the hire is still employed at 12 months), hiring manager satisfaction with the hire, ramp time (how quickly the hire reached expected productivity), and sometimes peer evaluation or cultural fit assessments.
The measurement challenge is real. Unlike time-to-fill (a timestamp comparison) or cost-per-hire (a budget sum), quality of hire requires post-hire data collection — performance reviews, manager surveys, retention tracking — that takes months to accumulate and requires coordination between recruiting and HR. This is why many organisations track time and cost but not quality: the data is harder to gather.
Connecting quality of hire back to recruiting inputs — which sourcing channels, which interviewers, which assessment methods — is the analytical step that makes QoH actionable. If hires from employee referrals consistently outperform hires from job boards, that's a portfolio allocation signal. If hires who scored above a threshold on a structured interview scorecard outperform those who scored below it, that validates the assessment tool.
Key Points: Quality of Hire
- Composite measure: Typically combines performance rating, retention, ramp time, and manager satisfaction into a single score.
- Post-hire data: Requires performance and retention data collected 90 days to 12 months after hire — not available at the point of decision.
- Source attribution: Linking QoH back to sourcing channels, assessment scores, and interviewers validates recruiting practices.
- True north metric: Speed and cost are inputs; quality is the outcome that determines whether the recruiting function is creating business value.
- Manager alignment: Hiring manager satisfaction is a core input — if managers don't consider their hires successful, the process has failed regardless of speed.
How Quality of Hire Works in Treegarden
Quality of Hire in Treegarden
Treegarden connects recruiting records to HR performance data in the same platform, enabling quality-of-hire tracking without manual data reconciliation. When performance reviews are completed in Treegarden's HR module, the results can be traced back to the original job, recruiter, interview scorecard, and sourcing channel. This closed loop enables data-driven analysis of which recruiting practices are producing the highest-quality hires.
Related HR Glossary Terms
Frequently Asked Questions About Quality of Hire
Quality of hire is calculated as a composite score from multiple post-hire indicators. The most common formula is: QoH = (Performance Rating + Retention Score + Hiring Manager Satisfaction + Productivity Score) / Number of Indicators, expressed as a percentage. Each input is normalised to a percentage scale before averaging. For example: performance rating of 4 out of 5 = 80%; retention (still employed at 12 months) = 100%; hiring manager satisfaction of 4.2 out of 5 = 84%; ramp time of 45 days versus expected 60 days = 100% (met or beat target). The composite would be approximately 91%. The specific inputs and their weighting should reflect what matters most for performance in your organisation — there is no universally correct formula.
Quality of hire should be measured at multiple points post-hire to capture different aspects of integration and performance. An initial 90-day check captures early performance and whether onboarding was effective. A 6-month measurement captures whether the hire has reached expected productivity levels. A 12-month measurement captures full-year performance and retention, providing the most statistically reliable quality signal. For organisations that want leading indicators earlier in the hire's tenure, hiring manager satisfaction surveys at 30 days capture initial impressions while they are still fresh and uncontaminated by later events. Collecting at all three points and tracking trends over time is more valuable than any single measurement.
Employee referrals consistently produce some of the highest quality-of-hire scores across industries. Referred candidates typically have more accurate expectations of the role and culture (having heard about them from a current employee), are pre-vetted for cultural fit to some degree, and are faster to hire. Internal promotions and transfers also tend to produce strong quality-of-hire scores because the organisation already has performance data on the individual. Direct sourcing of passive candidates — where a recruiter approaches a specific person for a specific reason — produces higher average quality than inbound applications because the recruiter is selecting for fit before the evaluation process begins. Job board inbound applications typically show the most variance in quality — the highest-quality applicants from job boards can be excellent, but the ratio of fit to non-fit applications is lower than in referred or directly sourced pipelines.
Improving quality of hire requires a systematic feedback loop between recruiting decisions and post-hire outcomes. Start by establishing measurement — collect 90-day and 12-month performance data for every hire and link it back to the recruiting record. Analyse the data to identify patterns: which sourcing channels, which assessors, which assessment tools, and which pipeline stage decisions correlate with strong versus weak quality-of-hire scores. Use these findings to adjust recruiting practices — retrain interviewers who are consistently associated with weaker hires, reallocate job board budget to higher-quality channels, and revise screening criteria based on what the performance data reveals about predictive indicators. This feedback loop typically takes 12-18 months to produce statistically meaningful findings but generates compounding improvements in hire quality over time.