Riffs on Quality

This is part of a comment for Dave Lefkow's always stimulating blog. You should check out his latest two posts on "Should Recruiters be Measured on Quality of Hire?":

The reason that people are talking about QOH is because they are trying to figure out whether recruiting is doing a good job from the company's (not the individual client's) standpoint. Are we adding top and / or bottom-line value to the enterprise? Our gut gives us an unqualified yes, but there is no data to back it up. So we search for the metrics that will convey our value.

Most people agree that a pure "My individual client likes me" measure of success doesn't translate into any meaningful "money" metrics for the enterprise as a whole. As more recruiting departments get outsourced (to organizations that can put a pure P&L measure to recruiting, I might add) we are left asking "How do we prove our value to the organization?" QOH has been the holy grail of that search. We believe that if we can show that the individual hire was "good" that we added value.

My point is that it doesn't work that way. Why? Because "good" doesn't mean much. Quality is a measure of fit to specification (specifically, the occurrence and scope of variation to specification over a determined period of time, but I digress). If the spec is bad then the measurement is meaningless (in other words, you can have a “good” QOH that really hurts the company’s financial health). What does quality mean when your job description is pure marketing hype? Not much I am afraid.

So my point was that QOH is the measurement du jour because we can't get to the heart of what we are trying to prove: that we (the internal employment organization) are better at attracting and placing talent that adds "value" than our competition (outsourcers, contingency firms, etc.). You then have to ask "What does 'value' mean?" From Wall Street’s (and therefore the executive suite’s) perspective it means more revenue or more profit. And since that can’t be measured on an individual contributor level (other than in sales) you have to fall back on "good." Which doesn't really solve the problem we are trying to solve.

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The people who will measure whether we know what we are doing or not (the executive suite) spent the 80's going through Total Quality Management and Statistical Process Control training. They know what quality really means. And they know it is not an end to itself. It is a means of generating better and more sustainable profits and revenue. The reason that the talent game is such a mystery to those people is that they know intuitively that "good" people lead to more profit and revenue. But nobody has yet figured out a way to demonstrate just which people lead to more revenue and profit. Recruiting will be a strategic player (and the most valuable part of the new age of Talentism) when it can consistently make that connection.

Comments

[hank]

Interesting discussion. It is important to understand if we make quality hires and to know the value of the hire.

Value and quality of a position must be defined first before proceeding to measuring value of quality talent.

Sounds logical...but do companies understand the quality metrics of a position. We all use sales because it's easy. Software companies can create models to value quality of QA, but do they. What is the value of customer support? Is it time spent with customers? Customer satisfaction? Lack of follow up calls?

There is much more work to be done to understand the complete business model and define appropriate measures of quality and value before we can adequately and appropriately measure talent.

The business plan exists, the numbers are there...in many instances they just require consolidation and definition.

The new talent organization has a dynamic opportunity to lead this strategic effort...

Maybe we need to consider how to get the horse before the proverbial cart.

Exciting stuff!