Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

Why Hasn’t IT Been Measured

While everyone agrees that new hire quality is important, many in HR question whether it can be measured. They are unequivocally wrong. New hire quality can be measured and any recruiting operation that is not doing so is inadequate at best. That said, it is important to understand why we haven’t been measuring it. We’re all professionals doing incredibly hard and complicated work that demands more, better, faster, and often with fewer resources. Metrics haven’t been part and parcel of our work because there haven’t been well founded and accepted standards regarding what we should measure or what the associated formulations should be. Collecting data is problematic and if we have the data, how are the results reported—what, when, and to whom? Consultants have also exacerbated the measurement of HR metrics. By definition, consultants are proprietary, and proprietary means they have to be different. So every consultant has different metrics to espouse. You can’t and shouldn’t embrace them all—what is a recruiter to do?

Quality is a particularly difficult metric because you have to decide when to take the measure and to differentiate impact of hires from employees in the existing work unit.

This further complication in measuring quality is the result of trying to assess the cause of quality performance. For example, is quality performance determined by the personal attributes of the individual or by environmental factors in the workplace? If the answer ...