Winning The Talent Game: Quality of Hire Trends in 2024

At this same time last year, we sat down with members of the Lattice people team to discuss all things quality of hire. A year later, we were joined by Tracy Keogh and Erin Peterson of Great Hill Partners to dive into how quality of hire has changed in 2024.

As former leaders of HR, TA, employee communications, and talent management for HP, Bloomberg, Accenture, Amazon, and more, Tracy and Erin shared proven techniques for hiring the best - whether you're scaling your enterprise team or making your first, most important hires at a startup.

Check out the full 1-hour webinar below or read on for a brief synopsis of the 3 topics areas discussed related to quality of hire (QoH).
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1.) How To Measure & Why It Matters

Tracy opened the conversation by mentioning how critical the concept of measuring QoH is, and it’s even more important now as many organizations are dealing with cost constraints. Measuring QoH also helps you get smarter over time, and you start to realize the impact a high quality hire has on your business vs. someone who was a mishire.

When it comes to measuring QoH, Erin mentioned that it’s an evolving measurement. Years ago, the only thing we had to go by was early attrition. Now, technology has given us more opportunity to get our arms around QoH.

Typically the classic measures are:

• Early attrition
• Speed to productivity 
• Hiring manager feedback 

And the more modern measures are: 

• Sentiment - candidate & employee
• Talent review position 
• Bonus/sales quota attainment
• “Better than 50%” follow-up > asking yourself “Is this person better than 50% of the current people in that role?” 

The important thing to do is to figure out what metrics are important for your organization. You should be talking to your hiring managers and asking them what they consider to be a high quality hire so you have a shared understanding with them.

Tracy and Erin consider this to be the holy grail > continue to track QoH. Don’t just track it for the first or second year but track it longer term…who was promoted, who had more opportunities within the organization, etc.   

2.) QoH & The Hiring Process 

Having an incredibly rigorous hiring process is pivotal to getting high quality hires. Step #1 is deciding how you’re going to assess talent across your business. Step #2 is ensuring you have a curated team approach. Assign different questions and roles to interviewers to ensure you’re assessing talent from a skills, behavior, and values perspective. 

Tracy made a very powerful point that the quality of your hiring process translates to your brand. Having a clear and clean process that your team takes very seriously will ultimately translate to better hires. This applies whether you’re hiring truck drivers, consultants, C-suite executives, and the like.

To close out this topic area, Tracy and Erin discussed how teams can wrap their heads around the cost of a bad hire. The statistics show the impact - the cost of a mishire is 2-5x an employee’s current salary. Bottom line - QoH impacts your revenue.

3.) QoH Trends

We’ve seen so many trends enter the talent landscape over the past year. So, we threw some trends at Tracy and Erin in rapid fire style to get their take on how each of them will affect quality of hire. 

• AI > Hiring Managers are going to start asking for candidates with AI skills (if they haven’t already started), so it’s important to understand how to talk about AI and how to get the talent they need 
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• Remote work > it’s here to stay. Most importantly, it expands your talent pool, but you have to make sure you’re creating a great experience to ensure the people you hire remotely are going to be successful within your organization. Companies that are focused on winning through quality talent are going to need to have a more open mindset about the concept of remote work. 
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• Skills-based hiring > acquiring new skills is so important because jobs are going to change a lot, especially with AI and new technologies. The actual skills we’re hiring somebody to bring on day 1 might change in 6 months, so you have to also think about interviewing for things like agility, learning capability, curiosity, etc. - hiring for the future of the job, not just the current job. 

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To conclude, Tracy mentioned that her biggest piece of advice is to deeply understand your business objectives and align your hires with those; because then you’ll be able to determine who is a great hire - is this person going to help generate revenue, are they going to create a better customer experience, etc. 

And with that, we wrapped things up!

Huge thanks to Tracy and Erin for joining us! Don't forget to check out the entire webinar linked above to uncover even more insightful nuggets.

And see you on April 24th for our next webinar! We’ll be joined by Anessa Fike, Founder and CEO of Fike + Co and author of The Revolution of Work: F*ck the Patriarchy and the Workplace It Built. We’ll be talking about what HR and TA teams can do to contribute to a work revolution. You can register for this live conversation here.