LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting research ranks quality of hire as the single most valuable recruiting KPI. Eighty-nine percent of talent acquisition professionals say it will become increasingly important to measure. Only 25% feel confident their organization can actually do it.
Most teams default to metrics that are easier to grab: time to fill, cost per hire, offer acceptance rate. Those numbers are real. They tell you nothing about whether the people you hired are working out. You know how quickly you filled the role. You do not know if you filled it with the right person.
Quality of hire is a shared outcome. It is shaped by how clearly the role was defined before recruiting started, how well the hiring process identified the right candidate, how onboarding set them up to succeed, and how effectively the manager supported their development. Recruiting does not own all of that. But recruiting is the right function to build the feedback loop — and most recruiting teams have not built one.
Start Here: The Minimum Viable Loop
Three things constitute the minimum:
- A hiring manager assessment at 90 days
- A new hire role-alignment survey at 30 and 90 days
- First-year voluntary and involuntary turnover tracked separately, with documented reason codes
Everything else in this article builds on that foundation. The surveys capture what the data cannot tell you. The turnover split tells you what kind of problem you may have. But only if you track them consistently and record why people left — not just that they did.
Start here. Then add layers as the data accumulates.
Signals Are Not Diagnoses
The metrics available after a hire are starting points for investigation, not verdicts. That distinction matters for how you present this data internally and what you do with it.