Sandwich-Making and Quality of Hire: A Surprising Connection

Making a Sandwich and Quality of Hire have much more in common than people think.

Let me explain.

The Process

Steps to Making a Sandwich:

• Grab bread to hold the contents
• Grab proteins, veggies, cheeses
• Grab condiments
• Combine
• Eat

On the surface, making a sandwich is a relatively simple process.

Steps for Calculating Quality of Hire.

• Grab Input 1
• Grab Input 2
• Repeat for the number of inputs you use
• Calculate
• Metric

Boom, now you have a sandwich and Quality of Hire. Done. Right?

Eh not so fast…

Saving everyone reading from an otherwise esoteric or pedantic explanation, creating a sandwich contained several unseen steps. The farmer had to grow wheat; the wheat had to be shipped to the flour maker; the flour maker had to make the flour to make the bread, and so on and so forth until you bought the bread to take it home.

The sandwich thought experiment, which probably has a more concise title, demonstrates how a number of interconnected parts come together to create a whole. It also shows that if one part is off, the other parts also suffer.

So how does this relate to the Quality of Hire?

Right now, there are a lot of debates about who owns and who gets measured by Quality of Hire. The truth is that, to get a metric like Quality of Hire, you have to measure all the parts, not just the sum of them.

But isn’t it a recruiting metric because recruiting finds the candidate?

Before a recruiter even gets started, a hiring manager has to give them a job description. A poor or incomplete or shifting job description means a wide range of candidates a recruiter will provide (unless they disregard aspects of the job description because it is a search for a mythological being). But ok let’s assume that the job description is flawless.

The candidate will still meet with, at a minimum, 3–4 people within the company. Interviewers aren’t perfect and prone to bias, so how does that impact the quality of candidates? A lot. Say you have the right candidates, wrong candidate experience. You’ve now lost customers.

But ok let’s assume none of that happens. You get the perfect candidate. The TA team gets them over the finish line and they start Day One. Then…

Day 30 in, your new hire quits. At this point, your candidate is an employee. Outside of internal mobility, and even that is a stretch, recruiting works with candidates, HR works with employees. So is it fair to put that on recruiting?

Well a hire means it is an employee so that would make Quality of Hire is an HR metric. I’m going to go and point the finger at them!

HR is a lot of things and one of those is everyone’s favorite punching bag. While you could point the finger there, it also isn’t accurate. Sure HR is responsible for employee and company well-being (more one than the other), but they aren’t omnipotent. If no one passes them information, then they can’t put in policies that change behaviors on the whole.

Ok, so not HR then… I’ll blame the hiring manager!

You could I suppose since the data would tell you that employees are more likely to leave their job because of their boss, not the job itself. But… that also wouldn’t be the whole story now would it? Yes, the HM is responsible for creating the right type of environment for an employee to succeed in but they don’t have control over that person’s life and how that impacts their work product. While they can moderate how those on their teams interact, they can’t fully control them either and people are bound to disagree.

So not recruiting, not HR, not the hiring manager. Are you saying it is an employee metric?

On the surface, it is. You are trying to determine whether this individual is a quality hire and how that rates within your company. But… people are using a lot of subjective measures (performance reviews, tenure, etc) to try to produce that Quality of Hire score. So let’s run this back a bit because it can’t be entirely on the employee:

• The employee isn’t given proper direction or guidance for what it takes to be successful in the company from their manager.
• The employee wasn’t provided with the right equipment to do their job so they’ve spent time building what they need and how they need it in order to be effective. This doesn’t show up in reviews or anything like that.
• The interviewers monopolized the time so the employee didn’t have an opportunity to ask the right questions.
• The recruiter was transparent during the interview with the employee but not honest so there were a number of things the employee had no clue about before making their decision.

If you had one of the following you might be able to say, “Well hey that shouldn’t have been a problem. People are flexible and can adapt” except that those are institutional failures that impact the employee’s quality of work.

I’ve made it to the end of this and want to know, “What are you actually getting at here?”

Fair question. I’m getting at this: while Quality of Hire is meant to measure the employee, it is almost better to think of it as a reflection of how a company hires. Each group has a part to play. Those parts can each be measured and fine-tuned. Not everyone will be the best hire, and that is a fact, but that shouldn’t stop a company from measuring everything it can to ensure all the ingredients are correct.