Measuring Talent Density with Quality of Hire

Overview

1. Leveraging Quality of Hire to Connect TA with Talent Density
2. How to Measure Quality of Hire
3. Define Quality of Hire
4. Flock Safety's Quality of Hire Process
5. Communicating Results
6. What's Next: Flock Safety's Roadmap

Transcript

Note: transcript is auto-generated, there may be typos.

[00:00:00] Anyways. My name is Laura Barnes. I am the Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety, and I'm super excited to get to be here with all of you today. I also realize I don't have a slide clicker. You probably want to give me that at some point. Um, but. We're gonna spend our time together today, really learning how to implement quality of hire to help y'all's companies become talent dense.

So I don't really like stuffy presentations, so we're gonna have some fun. We're gonna raise our hands. So raise your hand if you currently have an opinion on quality of hire. And like all of your hands should be up. You're sitting in a quality of hire talk. Right? There we go. So you're gonna keep them up if you are using quality of hire as a recruiting metric at your company today, anyone?

Okay? A few takers. We love it. And then finally, keep your hands up if you're using Ashby to track quality of hire. Okay.

[00:01:00] We actually have a few. That's fantastic. I think it's like a slowly getting adopted tool, but it's absolutely fabulous. So I'm gonna spend some time in the beginning kind of just setting the stage for how flock has changed over the four years I've been here and why we had to rethink our North Star metric in recruiting.

So I joined Flock in January, 2021 as their founding technical recruiter. Back then, we had just closed our series C and we were about a hundred employees. Today, I'm now the vice president of Talent. We have over 1400 employees. And we're now valued at $7.5 billion. So talk about a glow up, like it's a hell of a journey, let me tell you.

Everyone should get to do it once. But much like other hypergrowth companies, flock safety has a high performance culture. We have a bias towards action, and we have an extremely strong work ethic. It's a lot of late nights, let me tell

[00:02:00] you. But when we were much smaller, probably a hundred to 500 employees, it was really evident when you made a bad hire.

Subjective, but evident, right? Because when you're that small, you have such a tight grip on your culture and on recruiting and on performance management that it's very easy to tell when one of your hires is kind of going against the grain. When we got to around 700 employees, that's when it felt like the train just like came off the tracks.

We've all been there, right? That like Jesus, take the wheel moment. I'm like having that once a week in my job. So if you're not, I'm very envious. But it was really chaotic at that point in time because we were promoting so many first time leaders. We were bringing in new external leaders that had extremely strong opinions.

Let me tell you, we were standing up new teams with skill sets. We just didn't fully

[00:03:00] understand if anyone's recruited PHI Engineers. Any takers? No, of course not. I do that. It sucks. Um, but we also were bringing in new processes and new ways of working too. We'd gone from having 10 hiring managers. To 20, to 50 to a hundred plus that really tight grip we had on the culture and recruiting just felt like it was slipping and falling apart.

And so when you're struggling with consistency, I feel like most people turn to training, right? Like, let's get all these fools in a room, let's realign 'em and let's get 'em on the tracks. And training is a good strategy, but I don't think it's like an end all, be all that's actually gonna solve the problem you're facing.

And so when I was struggling with consistency, I kind of realized I wanted to build something a little different. I wanted to create something that was going to drive accountability with my hiring managers

[00:04:00] and really make them feel like they had a stake in the game. There you go. Um, I also wanted to design something that was going to make our executive team feel like our hiring team actually knew what we were doing, and we were bringing in fabulous people.

And I also wanted to create something that was going to allow my team to continuously improve after every single hire was made. And so in that moment, I was working with like a fabulous executive coach, and if you've never gotten to work with an executive coach, you should go ask your boss for one. That shit is lit.

Let me tell you. You just look like a batty all day at work and like they're paying for you to look that good. But that girl was great. She really gave me the courage to go out and solve this problem. And so I ended up doing what any sane professional would do. At the time, I gave it a Google, as my husband would say, and let's just put it this way.

There were a lot of opinions on the internet as we saw you

[00:05:00] all raised your hands. People all wanna do quality of hire in their own former fashion. And so luckily I'm a huge believer in a V one, and so I knew I just needed to get started simply and quickly to get my company bought in on this journey of turning our North Star and talent acquisition to quality of hire.

I. Boom. Okay, so we're gonna do something a bit different today and we're gonna talk about the results upfront. Mostly because I've been to some webinars and I just get like extremely bored in them. At the very end, I'm kind of like, Ugh, that was all you did. So hopefully you think these numbers are compelling enough to stay in your seat today.

And if you don't feel that way, you should honestly just stay in your seat. Like, don't embarrass me like that. It's not cool. So our average quality of higher score at. Flock is a 4.2 out of five. We have a 91% completion rate and we retain 90% of our employees at the one year mark. I'd call this an A. So

[00:06:00] these three scores, in my opinion, are like your ultimate trifecta.

They tell a really good story of like that actual quality of higher score. Because you're gonna have to have a high completion rate, right? Or else you're gonna be reporting data that's skewed to just a percentage of your population. So our dip is mostly due to the fact that half, I got about 200 install techs in my company.

They actually don't have laptops, so surveys don't really work for them. It's a little tough. And then, um, we are, retention rates are super important too, right? Because depending on the interval or cadence that you set up, if you have too many people dropping out before they're hitting those marks, your data's also gonna be slightly skewed.

So there's one thing I honestly attribute to being able to have such high scores within our first year of doing quality of hire, and that is our belief in a 90 day plan At Flock, we will not open a job requisition unless a hiring

[00:07:00] manager has sat down and fully baked out a 90 day plan and had it approved by our CEO and CPO.

Now, it's a time consuming process. I won't lie. But something beautiful does come from doing that, and that's the fact that your hiring manager actually has to decide what does success look like at 30, 60 and 90 days? And so by the time they're actually getting in a kickoff call with one of our recruiters, we have a unique competitive advantage where we get to build our interview plan around these metrics of success instead of just guessing on what the candidate profile's gonna be.

And so when I was thinking about how are we gonna do quality of hire at Flock, I really kind of gravitated towards these 90 day plans because we had only done informal check-ins between employees and hiring managers. We had never actually sat down and asked, were these 90 day plans actually worth it?

Right?

[00:08:00] We're putting in hours of work. And so I knew, I was like, let's just go and let's make our first point that we look at in 90 days and answer the question of, are our new hires having the impact we want them to? Okay, so this is like the cringes part of my entire presentation. So I don't like bragging on myself.

I find it really awkward. This is a quote from Garrett Langley. He's our founder and CEO. So Garrett says, our recruiting team isn't just filling roles, they're building a winning team. Their commitment to quality of hire ensures we attract and secure top tier candidates who not only possess the necessary skills, but also embody our core values.

They're truly instrumental in driving our success at Flock by bringing in talent that makes immediate and lasting impacts. Now, I love this quote for two reasons. The first one being, as I told you, I wanted to build something that our executive team was actually going to

[00:09:00] believe in, and I think this actually proves that.

And the second reason is. When we were much smaller, right? Garrett had the ability to interview every single company. And so your recruiting process is gonna be largely shaped by like your CEO. As we've gotten larger, Garrett can't interview every candidate. That would be such a waste of his time. So recruiting today is largely shaped by my fingerprints.

I have ownership over all of it. And to see that he actually believes in what we've been able to build is like really rewarding. Let me tell you. So here's our agenda, really simple stuff. So we're gonna learn three things today. We're gonna talk about leveraging quality of hire to connect TA with talent density.

We'll also talk about how to measure quality of hire. So I'll walk you through the actual process I put in place in the survey we're using, and then I'll walk you through my roadmap for the future. So let's get into

[00:10:00] it. This is a fun one and I love asking people to put their hands up. It just brings me joy.

I feel like a power rush. So put your hands up. If you, CEO has said the word talent density in the last few years, that should be like everyone. I feel like they're like all talking about it, right? And you can put 'em down. It's like the trendiest word out there in the market. And for good reason, right?

CEOs should care about it. They need to be getting the right people in the right seats to hit company goals. Because when you don't hit company goals, that's a really bad board meeting if you think about it. And you don't want an angry CEO coming to you after a board meeting. So talent density is really hard, and it's difficult because there are so many definitions for it.

There are so many formulas for it, and there are also so many ways to implement it. There's really no consistency out there, and so if you're

[00:11:00] lucky enough to have that spark of curiosity and to talent density, which it seems like many of us here today are, which is great, then what I would do is honestly encourage you to go and form an opinion on it quickly.

And that way you can go and get your seat at the table. Now, where I think talent acquisition seat at the quality of hire or the talent density table comes in is through quality of hire. Quality of hire and talent density are best friends you like, cannot have one without the other. It is like very much chicken and the egg, right?

Because if you are not paying attention. To who you're bringing in at the top of the funnel and who you're putting into the seats. You're never gonna have a talent dense organization. You might get lucky a few times, but you didn't sit down and develop a strategy to actually accelerate density in your company.

And so I've come up with like a really fun way that I kind of like to look at this

[00:12:00] and it's this quote where strong quality of hire fuels talent density. So I would totally encourage you to like write that down. I felt like a genius when I came up with it onwards. So I've done a lot of talking, which is fun and a good time, and I think we haven't really talked about what quality of hire is.

So you can obviously read this definition on the slide if you want to, but simply put, quality of hire is how well a new employee performs in their role and adds value. Now, I'll be the first to admit that quality of hire is very far from perfect. It is clear, but it's simplistic. It's actionable, but it's subjective.

However, when used thoughtfully, quality of hire can be the greatest tool

[00:13:00] to fine tune your recruiting process and create a team that is engaged, productive, and stays. That's what we've been lucky enough to experience at Flock, and that's what I hope each of you is lucky enough to get to experience at your own company.

So let's talk about how we got here, because it was a hell of a journey. So when I joined in 2021, it was all about speed, time to fill, ruled our world. We were growing at a rate of like a hundred percent year over year for like three years straight, maybe four. It was honestly very scary because we were growing so much.

We had to get people in as quickly as possible. Like we were hitting like time to fills of like 30 days all the time. And back then myself and the other tech recruiter who were working together, we deemed this period in flock's history as swamp recruiting, which none of you have

[00:14:00] probably ever heard that term before.

And for good reason, swamp recruiting is basically due to the fact that we had no hiring plan, we had no standardized interview process, and we had no salary bans. That last one sounds like really fun, right? Could have been. But we are unfortunately headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, so we're a little frugal.

Let me tell you what I would call engineers in SF with an Atlanta, Georgia salary price got laughed at a lot, but we persevered onward, right? And so I had the really unique privilege back then of getting to sell staff engineers on a one 60 K base. No bonus and a dream, and for whatever reason, those fools decided to accept my offer.

I think I'm a decent storyteller. I don't know, maybe a good personality, but it was a bad offer. But what was very funny

[00:15:00] about the whole situation is these engineers have gone on to be our best hires at flock still to this day. And we had no way of knowing that back then. We weren't tracking it. We weren't looking at it like I was already so far off onto the next hire.

I didn't even realize it, which is such a bummer, honestly. And so as time went on, I started managing recruiting teams at Flock, which is super exciting. Time to fill was very much still ruling our world. We were all about speed. And as I started managing people, I would always preach to my recruiters, right?

Like, take that extra week, right? Like Go source one more candidate. Go find that little slack channel that all those engineers are hiding in that you feel like such a batty when you get invited to it. You're like, I'm the only recruiter in here. How sick. It's a great feeling.

[00:16:00] But I realized like no matter how much I told them.

To do this. They didn't care because I like motivated them with speed and recruiters, myself included. We're a competitive little bunch. Like you're lying if you're not competitive. Like you wanna be on that leaderboard every single week. Right? Like, hell yeah, I'm crushing my job. And when the ultimate goal is speed, they're gonna hit that every single time.

And so I started to get like slightly frustrated 'cause I was like, damn, like we're complacent. We are like not raising our quality bar. We're not going into debriefs and like pushing back on interviewers and hiring managers. We're not trying to source, we're relying on applicants. Just felt like really lazy, just like, not a good way to describe it, but it did feel that way.

But my recruiters are pushing out volumes of hires, like so many, but it just didn't

[00:17:00] feel like we were doing right by the business. And so I started to wonder if I could actually go and incentivize them towards quality. Right? Like how easy makes perfect sense when you say it out loud. But implementing quality of hire is complex, right?

It's not like you just dream it up and pop it into your organization and call it a day. You have some hurdles that come with it, and some of those hurdles are survey fatigue, subjectivity, and obviously implementing a new process. So we'll take a quick like detour and I will like lightly touch on these for you.

So survey fatigue. Everybody hates surveys. I hate surveys. Do you hate surveys? Yeah, absolutely. I was gonna say, if you're gonna say no, that was gonna really ruin my vibe, but that's okay. So thank you for being supportive. That's a good front row person right there, guys. That's what we like to see. So people hate surveys because they take too much time and there is no value

[00:18:00] at all.

Have you filled out engagement surveys before and like nothing happens, right? And you're like, I told you everything that was wrong. Why did you do no nothing to fix it? Same shit. So when you're building your survey, you need to do something that's fast. So our survey when we launched our V one was literally one question and we were able to show value from it in the same week.

That was the goal. I wanted buy-in quickly. Now, subjectivity is a tricky one, right? Because quality of hire is inherently subjective. You're only talking to one half of the equation. So knowing that, I think you need to just put a few guardrails in place. So the first thing we did was align our quality of higher rating score to what we use in performance management.

So that was already clear, consistent language that people were used to in flock and it was also like one less thing I had to do. Snaps to that. We love lazy work.

[00:19:00] And the other thing you need to do for subjectivity is partner with your HRBP team. Those wonderful humans are going to allow you to treat every score you get as a signal and not fact.

That is what you must do in implementing a new process. I have seen so many failed processes get implemented at Flock. It's hilarious. At this point in time, processes fail because people build the process for themselves, not their end user. So when you're thinking about how to set up quality of hire, you need to get in the head of like your recipient.

So we send ours to hiring managers. And so I had to think on a day to day, where are my hiring managers, what tools are they in, what are they using, and how can I make sure that wherever I'm sending my survey from is something that fits naturally into their life and doesn't require them to take extra clicks.

[00:20:00]

So back to our story. So at the end of 2023 is when I finally built my V one. And oh my God, was it ugly? Let me tell you, it was a Google sheet and a Google form. I was very humble and I had to manually email every single hiring manager that had a new hire reach 90 days. And then I manually sent a reminder email to every single hiring manager who did not want to respond.

And the survey, as I said, was super simple, right? They just had to put in their department the new hire's name, which I gave to them, and then they just answered, would you rehire this employee? It was easy. We sent this survey to 170 hiring managers, and we got 140 responses, so I would call that a win. It was completely optional, by the way, just a beta test.

I wanted to see if they would do it. And so in March of 2024 is when we implemented

[00:21:00] Ashby, which is a fantastic decision. If you're not a customer yet and you're thinking about being a customer, I would be happy to talk to you about it. But Ashby marked our move to our V 1.5 survey, and it also was when we started automating everything.

And now today we have over 700 responses, and it's only growing from there. So this is the framework I used on my project. This is completely made up, so you should not Google it. It'd actually be like really embarrassing. I tried. It doesn't exist, but it is in your newspaper, so it's a real thing now. So this is called ADD sas.

So a SaaS stands for align design. Specify Automate and Share, and I'm gonna show you how to do it. So step one, alignment with people, teams. So this is my team. They're really cute, right? I

[00:22:00] love them. Some of them are missing. Please don't poach them. I'd be really sad. Um, onwards. So I'm in a very unique situation where my chief people officer is actually one of our co-founders.

And so if you've ever worked in founder led organizations, then you might know what I mean when I say you have got to be a whisperer. You need to know how to influence stealthily because founders do not always want to hear your feedback or opinions. And so when I was having this idea that I wanted to move our North Star metric to quality of hire, I knew I needed to present it in a way that aligned with what my chief people Officer wanted.

And so at Flock, we are tightly held to the belief that we want to do more with less. We've heard that several times today. So we wanna do more work with less people. We actually have the most rudimentary slide that we put up in almost every single all hands about it. So funny.

[00:23:00] But as I started mulling that statement over, I kind of started realizing like do more with less is essentially quality of hire, just in a different way of saying it.

And so I went to Paige one day who's my CPO, and I was like, Hey girl. Like what if we aligned talent acquisition and how we hire at flock to this principle of like doing more with less. And if we did that, then shouldn't The impact that each new hire makes actually be our North star in what we truly care about.

Because think about it this way, if we don't wanna care about quality, then we're gonna end up hiring C players. And you know what happens when you hire C players? Well, they usually perform at like, let's call it 60% capacity. And when a team isn't performing up to capacity, what does a hiring manager usually do?

[00:24:00]

Hire more. They hire more people. That is correct. Yes. They bring on more headcount. And so in theory, aren't you actually doing less work with more people? Big. Yikes. That was an earth shattering moment for us. I got my way because I framed what I wanted in a way that aligned with the core tenet of our business.

And so pushing this message to hiring managers became extremely easy because we were using language they already knew. Do more with less, except now we were gonna test for it. Now there is one other person. You gotta get bought in at this step of the process, otherwise it's not gonna work. And that is your HRBP team.

Without them, a lot of this data is gonna be meaningless. They are. Who is going to allow you to treat those scores as signal that you can actually investigate and figure out

[00:25:00] what's happening. I'll put it to you this way. You'll probably be surprised how many times a low score. It's actually more reflective of your hiring manager, a process or your culture than it is the actual new hire themselves.

Okay, step two, get started simply and quickly. This is all about building your V one. So like this is, don't do that, that's bad. That's scary stuff. I don't do math, so like I avoid it at all costs. So at flock we have an intense bias towards action. We move so fast, as do most startups, right? And so when you see an idea at flock or you have one, you have got to go after it quickly, or we're like moving on to the next thing and you got left in the dust.

So we're not big fans of the word strategy because to us, if you start talking about strategy, that means you're just gonna go

[00:26:00] sit in a corner by yourself for like two months thinking about doing the work. I. Instead of just like doing the damn work. So I went from having that conversation with Paige to launching that first email in the same week, and I was able to do it so quickly because I simplified this down.

I picked one point of the funnel that I wanted to measure, which was 90 days, picked one audience to send it to, which is hiring managers. And I picked one question, which was, would you rehire this employee? And my whole goal here was just to build buy-in and get people excited about it and show that this could be something that actually was meaningful to flock.

So this is a long one. Determine survey specifics. So this is when we moved to V 1.5, and this is a fun time, so. I built my V one in

[00:27:00] step two, right? And now that little bad boy is like out there humming along. It's doing its thing. It's sparking conversation, which is exciting. And so I got to focus on the naughty word, which is strategy.

And you get to focus on the naughty word when you're actually doing the work, because now you can think about your work because it's doing it for you. So when you're ready to jump to your V 1.5. There are five questions I think you need to figure out. The first one is what are you trying to get out of this?

The second one is, what's your cadence? Then who are you sending this to? What questions are you asking? And then what's your rating scale? That's it. Don't over complicate it. So I'll run you through my thought process when I built this. So my cadence is a bit unique, as you can see. And so when I was dreaming up the next iteration of Quality of Hire at Flock, I had this

[00:28:00] weird idea where I was like, could I combine traditional quality of hire with talent density and actually create a survey that tracked that whole first year of employment?

Because I was really interested in obviously like great hiring, but also what came afterwards. And so in my mind too, I was like, Ooh, if I could actually expand this, I'm gonna make this survey more valuable than just to recruiting. Now my people team wants a part of it. My executives want more. We're actually getting way more interesting data.

Now, most people when they do pick like why they're doing this or what their cadence is gonna be, they're probably gonna opt for the 30 day, 60 day, and 90 day cadence. And I think that is fabulous. If that works for you, you should do it. It's industry standard, and most people choose that cadence because they're generally looking for really quick

[00:29:00] indicators of success that they can weave back into their recruiting process as quickly as possible.

The only reason I think I was able to pull off, like my little fun experiment here is really thanks to those 90 day plans that we use. Like we're already doing check-ins at 30 and 60 in 90 days, so if I need fast feedback, I can already get it. So why test for it then? So I'll kind of walk you through the types of data we sometimes see at 90 days, six months and 12 months, since it's a bit like odd and not typical.

So at 90 days, the data you get is probably gonna be more reflective of like your recruiting process. Onboarding and the performance of the employee, right? So strong scores could show you that, hey, your new hire is off to a great start. Maybe your employee value proposition you built is actually attracting the right talent, which is fantastic.

[00:30:00]

Low scores could show you that maybe you have a situation where that job description you built doesn't actually align to what the job is today. Right? And that's yikes. It could also show you that, hey, maybe something went wrong in onboarding and we didn't actually set that employee up for success, and we might want to take a look at that at six months.

The scores tend to show you more around employee development. Engagement and sometimes manager feedback, and so high scores could obviously show you that you have an employee with increasing high performance, which is awesome. It's the dream. It could also show you that maybe you have a culture of like autonomy where your employees are able to come in and grow and thrive.

Low scores could show you that you might have a hiring manager who actually doesn't know how to deliver critical in the time feedback that you want to go and coach. And it could also show that there might be gaps in your learning and development

[00:31:00] strategy that you wanna take a look at. At 12 months, our data tends to show more around retention, talent management, and performance management.

So strong scores could show you that you've created a culture that is retaining high performers. How fantastic of you could also show that you have an effective talent strategy. Low scores are gonna show you more systemic issues that you probably wanna look at ASAP, and they're also gonna show you that you might have a weak performance management culture.

Again, you might need to train your hiring managers on how to actually coach and develop people. Now, the most important thing to remember here is regardless if the score is high or it is low, this is not a blame game. We're never trying to pin a bad hire on a person or a team. That's where things don't get fun.

Instead, we wanna treat each score as a

[00:32:00] learning opportunity where we're able to look at the data and figure out what are we doing exceptionally well so that we can go and capitalize it on it. And then what are we maybe a little weaker at? That way we can figure out a strategy to improve and we don't have to make the same mistake twice.

So let's move on to who I send this to and my questions. So my end user is our hiring manager, and if anyone in the audience is doing something different, please find me later. I love odd situations, but because I chose a hiring manager, I obviously picked questions that they are best to answer. And so when we did our V one, we only had one question.

Today with our V 1.5, we have three questions, and so those are after working with my employee for X amount of time, they're thriving relative

[00:33:00] to their goals and expectations. The second one is, if you were rehiring for this role today, would you enthusiastically rehire this employee? And then we also give them an optional comment box in case they wanna elaborate a little further.

Now, these questions were picked intentionally because I was really interested in understanding employee impact at these different points in time. And I also wanted to understand that if I gave a hiring manager a fresh start, would they actually re-pick this person? Okay. Now the wording of the questions was also intentional.

Obviously, I chose the words thriving and enthusiastically because they elicit a stronger response. They really help our hiring managers group themselves as either a one to two or a four to five. My goal is for them to have really strong conviction on a

[00:34:00] hire. Like, think about it this way, right? If I was to ask you, would you rehire this person?

It's very easy to say, sure. Like, why not? Let's do it. But if you're saying, would you enthusiastically rehire this person? For some reason it feels like I'm gonna go run your answer to your mom. And that's scary. They don't like that. Um, so the last thing for you to really figure out here is your rating scale.

And so at Flock we use a one through five, and that is what we use for performance management. Again, I wanted to keep it the same, to really drive clarity and consistency and also when you know you're working towards your V two and you might wanna bring more data together, it's nice to have consistent numbers.

The other reason I chose one through five is like, I didn't wanna do more work, if I'm being honest. Like why recreate the wheel if the wheel's already working for you? Right? Just steal what the people team did. Make it easy on yourself. And so that's my survey. It's very simple. That was the

[00:35:00] point. I just wanted to get something out there and start getting data and do the work.

So step four, automation is key. Oh my gosh. Manual emails is not it. Let me tell you. It was a really dark time in my life. So automating this survey is going to allow you to do what you love, which is analyze the data. Uncover trends. Be a fabulous business partner to your hiring managers. And so I use Ashby to automate my data and they have been a fantastic partner.

If you are an Ashby customer today, you are probably already using them to automate some part of your recruiting process. So like why not let them automate the backside? Just saying, I really do attribute our 91% completion rate to just how easy it has been to work with them. And let's like go back to that.

Implementing a new process thing too.

[00:36:00] They're in Ashby every single day. My hiring managers, like where this little survey reminder sits, is the same place where their scorecard reminder sits. So you can just kill two birds with one stone. When you got that one hiring manager who refuses to fill out a damn scorecard, happens all the time.

Okay, step five, regularly, share and discuss results. This is the most important part of this. If you are not creating value with this data, then like you just did really meaningless work. Truly. So, quality of hire has tremendously shaped our talent acquisition strategy. I cannot imagine not having it today.

I now have more data than ever before on what a quality hire means to flock. And that's life changing. The other very cool advantage I have is because I capture all of this in Ashby, I also get

[00:37:00] access to their fantastic reporting features. And so I can take quality of hire and I can look at it by hiring manager, by recruiter salary band.

Average interview score department, like, let me tell you, it's game changing when you're trying to train people and figure out why is this one hiring manager crushing it or why is this recruiter crushing it? It's awesome. Now, I could spend my time today like walking you through all these different practices, but that felt like really boring if I'm being honest.

So we'll skip that instead. I'll give you one example. So we were having the very fun age old debate of what's the best candidate profile for this role? And we had the usual suspects, right? You got like the early startup candidate, the ex founder or big tech. It's like the three that always pop up. And so in the past when we'd be having this

[00:38:00] debate, we'd get into a room and we'd typically talk about our feelings.

It was really cute, let me tell you. And this time around was different because we had quality of higher data. And so I actually got to sit down and look at the data for this team. And what I found was it did not matter where this person came from. What mattered was that they possessed two skills. They needed to have an ownership mindset, and they needed to thrive in autonomy.

Now, had I not had access to that data, we would've sat in our room. We would've talked about our feelings for 30 minutes. The loudest voice probably would've won, and then my candidate pool would've gotten significantly reduced for absolutely no reason. Instead, since we had the data, we actually got to go back and rework our entire interview process

[00:39:00] to make sure we were optimizing for those two traits.

Quality of hire for me has been the best tool ever to develop really strong relationships with your hiring managers and your executive team to actually help them build exceptional teams. And that's really the end goal of recruiting. And that's it. This is the cutest slide ever. This is how you add sass.

Very easy. You're welcome. All of you're capable of doing this, I promise. So let's talk about what is next, the future, all the fun stuff. So there's three things I really wanna tackle next on the roadmap. The first one is rating leaders based on the talent density of their org. The second is comparing quality of hire surveys to employee sentiment.

And the third is creating stronger feedback loops with our onboarding teams. So the first one is obviously

[00:40:00] like my spiciest take, but I personally love it. So I'm a big believer that leaders should be evaluated on more than just what they deliver to the business. They also need to be evaluated on the teams that they're building.

Right, because if your ultimate goal is talent density, your leaders play a massive role in getting the right person in the right seat. So bringing talent density into performance management basically just echoes that your company really cares about. Exceptional team building. Now the second one, quality of hire is pretty subjective, right?

So I actually think it's a really interesting view when you can take quality of hire data and lay over employee engagement data or sentiment data over it. Because think about it this way, if you have someone who's like crushing their quality of higher surveys, right? But it turns out they are disengaged or burned

[00:41:00] out, they're gonna leave you.

They're not sticking around and like what was the point of like bringing that person in then? Right? So if you start to layer quality of hire and engagement data together, you start to tell a really interesting story of what does success look like, but also what it takes to retain it. That's the goal.

And finally, I wanna do a better job of having really strong feedback loops with my onboarding team. I'm a big believer that the first 90 days is either going to like set your new hire up for success, or they're gonna fail, right? They're either gonna accelerate or stall. And so if we can build the best onboarding process that really allows them to thrive starting day one, we're gonna see that payoff at that six month and 12 month mark.

And finally, here we go, V two. Scary stuff. So Googling quality of hire and talent density is

[00:42:00] scary, right? There's tons of formulas out there. So my advice is to start simple, build your confidence, and then work up to something fun. So when I built my V 1.5, I really wanted to combine quality of higher and talent density into the most simple survey I could.

And that's still my goal with my V two because great hiring is really just the beginning. We care about what happens afterwards too. And so with the V two, we're basically just incorporating new layers with that quality of hire score, like engagement data, promotion data, and yearly performance scores.

Now, I wish turning this on was as simple as like me describing these numbers. Smashing them together and like calling it a day and being like, look what I built, how sick. But it's not right to do it exceptionally well. We have to continue to tighten up our recruiting systems and our performance

[00:43:00] management systems and make sure that we're driving clarity and consistency across every business and team in flock, because if we're not all speaking the same language and evaluating a three or a four the same, then this data's gonna be inaccurate and it's gonna be really hard to figure out our talent density.

Now what I can say is that the journey from a V one to a now more comprehensive view of talent has been extremely rewarding. Watching the evolution of quality of hire has shown how powerful it can be. When we apply rigor to things we care about, like hiring the right people, building high performing teams, and developing talent that thrives.

And truly we're still just getting started. I feel like I'm a baby on my quality of hire journey, but it's been so fun and that's the point. So if you're still looking for like

[00:44:00] a key takeaway at this point in time. I got you, but hopefully you wrote something down by now. But the biggest one is to start simple and start now.

Trust me, having a V one is so much better than sitting in a corner thinking about it. No one gets promoted for thinking truly do the work. Next, automate, please manual emails suck. Use Ashby or use someone else. But like, don't waste your time doing that. And third, create value. Don't just sit on a bunch of dusty reports that ain't gonna get you promoted either.

Driving real change in the business is what everyone wants to see. And so that's it. That's quality of hire. Thank you for having me. So much fun.

Key Takeaways

• Start simple with a one-question survey and build complexity over time rather than attempting to create a perfect system from the beginning.
• Automate quality of hire surveys through your ATS to achieve higher completion rates and reduce manual administrative work.
• Align quality of hire questions with existing performance management language and rating scales to ensure consistency and reduce training overhead.
• Partner with HRBP teams to treat quality of hire scores as signals for investigation rather than absolute facts, enabling deeper analysis of hiring and management issues.
• Create value from quality of hire data by using insights to refine interview processes, candidate profiles, and recruiting strategies rather than just collecting reports.
• Focus survey questions on hiring manager enthusiasm and employee thriving to drive stronger conviction in hiring decisions and more actionable feedback.
• Regularly share and discuss quality of hire results with stakeholders to demonstrate recruiting team impact and continuously improve talent acquisition processes.