Spent some time with a member of the HR Capitalist community over the past few days to talk about one of those simple concepts - Quality of HIre.

I kid - Quality of Hire is an elusive concept.  The biggest problem with any type of QoH metric is that performance of the candidate in question usually has to be taken into account.  And most companies are really, really bad at measuring true performance.

So I'm here to give you a simpler way to get at Quality of Hire.  Here's my back on the napkin thoughts:

1. Define the baseline related to QoH as someone who sticks at your company for a year.  After all, if you fire them or they leave voluntarily in a year, it wasn't a quality hire.  Note that I'm not saying who's responsible for that "fit".  Ultimately, everyone's responsible, including and probably most importantly, the hiring manager.

2. Survey your hiring managers and ask them to rate their satisfaction of the new hire according to:

    -Overall quality of the hire, 

    -Quality of hire for the money they could spend in salary, and

    -Quality of the hire for what was available in the marketplace for all the "must have's" they listed.

3. Survey the hiring managers on the questions above on the new hire's first day and then at the one year mark.  Bring the stat geeks in to help you analyze the difference.

So my definition is pretty simple.  It's not a quality hire if they're not there in a year.  Once that's been established I'm interested in the hiring manager's opinion, but I'm not going to be boxed in by what they think overall - I'm going to make them give me how we did for the money they could spend, and for what the reality is related to the actual presence of the perfect candidate in the marketplace.

If you do a good job as an HR pro/Recruiter with educating hiring managers about what the market looks like (comp and skills/experience available), you should get a more realistic quality rating.

Quality of Hire - it's subjective.  Like porn style, you know it when you see it.