What does hiring success look like? When it comes to determining whether your company’s hiring process is successful, a lot of different factors probably come into play.
This is something we were curious about here at Criteria, so we decided to go to the source. We put out a survey earlier this year, asking hiring professionals from all industries and company sizes how they determine hiring success, and we compiled those results in the 2019 Pre-Employment Testing Benchmark Report. Here’s what we found:
Hiring professionals use job performance more than any other factor when deciding if their hiring process is successful. In other words, is the new hire able to perform well on the job? This is pretty self-explanatory. But it isn’t the full story.
Companies are combining additional metrics to ultimately decide how successful their hiring process is. The next highest on the list is turnover and retention. 73% of respondents said that they use this as a determining factor. What this means is that the success of a hire isn’t just based on how well they perform, but also how long they stay in the role.
Next we see culture fit coming in at 64%, which is a metric for how well a new employee fits in with the current culture and works with the team. This is important because it is somewhat tied to turnover. After all, an employee who does not mesh well with the current team is less likely to want to stay long term.
Employee engagement follows, at 54%. Being good at the job and staying long term is one thing, but how engaged is the employee? Over half of HR professionals view engagement as a key component of a successful hire.
Next we see hiring manager satisfaction, at 47%. For many HR professionals, the hiring manager’s satisfaction with a new hire is a fairly simple way to gauge the quality and success of that hire.
It’s also interesting to note some of the items that didn’t rank as all that important for our respondents. Specifically, time to hire and cost per hire were low on the list of metrics that hiring professionals use to determine if their hiring process is a success. Our take is that hiring professionals really want high quality employees, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes or how much it costs. The value of that great employee outweighs these other metrics.
In addition, we see diversity in hiring to be pretty low on the list, at 20%. While many organizations have diversity initiatives for hiring, it seems like most companies don’t factor that in when determining how successful the overall hiring process is. Ultimately the most salient factors are job performance, with retention at a close second.
Want to see more insights from our 2019 survey? Download your own copy of the benchmark report.
