Quality of Hire vs Impact of Hire?

Date: 11th March, 2026   location: NUVEEN, 201 Bishopsgate, LONDON, EC2M 3BN

Event Summary

You can debate leading and lagging indicators all you like… and the semantics of measurement.

What we all fundamentally need is 3 things:

1.  a way to measure and understand, early, whether we are hiring great people
2. a way to measure in the longer run what specifically makes up super high performers in our orgs. Bar raisers. Culture add.
3. a repeatable way for this insight to feed into our workforce planning, hiring strategy and process (headhunting, JDs, scorecards etc)

This stuff isn’t always straight forward, though. It’s been described as the “holy grail” by some.

30+ senior leaders in the community came together to explore some beautifully simple measurement frameworks and then hear about + co-designed some more complex ones.

Most came away with upgraded 2.0 thinking on the subject

3 in 4 senior leaders favoured simplicity over complexity.

Pre Event Survey

We asked residents:

“When you hear Quality of Hire and Impact of hire, what time horizon do you attach to each?”

1) QoH = Short term | IoH = Long term
2) QoH = Long term | IoH = Short term
3) Both are short term
4) Both are long term

The majority perceived both as being observed over the long term. However we did have others believe that impact was something we can observe pretty quickly. Especially if framed as ramp time.

This topic is always super interesting as “quality” and “impact” can mean something completely different to one person or organisation Vs another.

Keeping it simple!

Up top Ben Rutter shared his journey on this subject over the last 2 years.

His observation is that we are overcomplicating it. Trying to be clever. Trying to look for perfection.

He shared 2 beautifully simple metric concepts. Ones which could be implemented today! In any business!

Validated by a working group of CPOs in Boston + what we use at Bond Global to ensure our talent partners deliver to “world class is our only standard”.

Concept 1 – Quality of Hire NPS Score

Based on asking hiring managers one simple Q “would you hire this person again?”.

That HM survey we think would happen at 6 months.  It can be whatever point in time makes most sense to you though.

This NPS 0 – 10 score is very familiar:

1 – 3, would be a hard no. The hire has possibly already left the business or is under performance management. Collaborative scrutiny of why needed. Learnings factored back into process.

4 – 5, would be a maybe. You need to consider whether this was a mis-hire or if there are reasons it’s not a simple yes!

7 – 9, would be a yes. You’d definitely hire this person again and TA have smashed it.

10, would be a hell yeah. This person is a bar raiser and we need to learn more about what makes up folk like this and feed that into our process.

Why is this so cool?

– TA are in control of the data
– This could be rolled out tomorrow, with a small bit of HM education/training
– In theory this could be an industry standard

Imagine walking into an interview process or new job as a Head of TA and the conversation might go like this. So how many hires did we do last year, 400, OK cool. What’s our QoH NPS? It’s 7 right now, “we’re in the blue zone”.

We would instantly know how much work there was to be done.

Concept 2 – Impact of Hire

Bar raisers, talent density. All big buzz words right now.

But in short what people are saying is are we hiring people that have impact and make us better than we are right now.

In this simple methodology you take the average performance score of thew new hires and divide that by the average of the current hires.

This will give you an impact score i.e are we bringing in better talent than we did say a year ago, 2 years ago.

Whatever performance scoring rubric you use and how ever frequently this is conducted the simple methodology works.

There is significant scope to tailor this simple model to your business by defining what new and current means.

There are some potential pitfalls:

1) If you operate on a “partially met / met / exceed” or similar you might have 80% sit in the middle category. Making it hard to differentiate. However, if that’s the case you could run this as a % of exceeds in the new vs the current workforce as a similarly simple temperature check.

2) With all of this there is the potential for bias. Some managers scoring highly to make sure it doesn’t look bad on them. Effective training and the creation of psychological safety will mitigate this.

Resident Spotlights

First up we had Gita Selli, Global Director of Talent Acquisition @ Loadsmart.

She shared a trademark story of how to influence business impact through the intelligent use of data. Gita and her team had been using a similar hiring manager survey design to the one Ben presented.

This enabled Loadsmart to pinpoint areas of concern and fix any “leaky boats”. The story covered how the data was used to influence the COO and ultimately enable the business to course correct with leadership training and upskilling, targeted at the right audience at the right time.

The “Great British Metric Bake Off”

Things then got competitive as senior leaders co-baked new, slightly more complex, quality of hire and impact of hire metrics.

Bakers created their perfect 3-ingredient cakes for QoH and IoH. Leaders pitched their ideas to other groups. 6 bakes became 3, before the room voted on the best bake. 1 for QoH and 1 for IoH.

All in pursuit of the coveted Ryan “O’Hara Handshake” and eternal bragging rights.

A full write up of those recipes and the insights can be found here