Quality of hire
A measure of how well hired candidates perform and stay, used to judge whether a hiring process is selecting the right people.
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In practice
It is the metric everyone agrees matters and almost nobody defines consistently. Common proxies are performance rating at twelve months, retention at one year, and time to productivity, each measuring something different and each carrying its own bias.
Every proxy inherits the biases of the system that produced it. Performance ratings are themselves subject to the same demographic effects as hiring decisions, so a hiring process optimised against them can faithfully reproduce a rating bias and report it as success.
Its opposite number, time to hire, is popular precisely because it is easy to count. Improving it by lowering the bar looks identical on a dashboard to improving it by removing waste.
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Predictive validity
The extent to which performance on a selection method actually predicts performance on the job, expressed as a correlation.
Selection rate
The proportion of candidates from a given group who pass a particular stage of a hiring process.
How CalHire handles this: Hiring analytics, benchmarks and talent rediscovery
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Longer pieces on this and the arguments around it.
Time-to-hire is a throughput metric. Quality-of-hire is the one that matters
Speed metrics are easy to collect and easy to game. How to measure whether your hiring decisions were any good, and which metrics to pair with which.
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