What impact can a successful hire have on an organisation? The answers to such questions will depend on the job itself but even more on how success is defined in a specific organisation.

However, too few organisations understand what success looks like for them as a whole, and even fewer have determined which factors influence success in roles across their breadth. So revealed self-described “data nerd” Anne E Herman of the Kenexa Research Institute at a seminar held in London last week.

Herman believes organisations must move beyond efficient to effective recruiting, and has been studying the quality of hire in terms of how talent influences organisational performance. She contends that effective, or quality-focused, recruiting then leads to increased competitive capability, with a strong climate of engaged workers and performance excellence.

But achieving a high performance culture depends on recruiters knowing what they are looking for in new recruits in specific jobs from the start. “We’re trying to bring in good candidates who will add value to the organisation,” Herman said. “But we need to make sure we’re evaluating new hires in a way that makes sense.”
For example, Kenexa’s Quality of Hire Index includes benchmarking dimensions such as adaptation, analysis and integration of information, communication, principle-based action, skill development aptitude and collaboration and cooperation, amongst others.

Kenexa’s research of 160 organisations across industries and geographies revealed that organisations which engaged their workforces and channeled engagement into high performance outperformed those that didn’t by 2.5 times in terms of “health metrics in financial peformance”. When the impact of talent on organisational performance can be qualified in this way, “people start to listen” to the need to invest in effective recruiting, Herman said.