When it comes to high-impact hires, we all have that favorite employee we’ve brought on. A story that sticks with us over the years, still brings a smile to our face, and reminds us of the pride we feel for the work we do and the legacy we share.
One thing I never take for granted in the hiring process is how important that decision is for the person on the other side of the call. I still get a smile on my face when I pick up the phone to offer the candidate a role. Getting candidates excited about the opportunity, working with hiring managers to align on expectations, and making sure that person can deliver, succeed, and also feel fulfilled - that is the beauty of recruiting.
And when we ask leaders about their best hires, the ones they still think about years later, the cornerstone of quality of hire becomes clear. It is not just about performance on a dashboard. It is about how working with that person made us feel. It is about sharing in their success, rooting for them, and feeling proud of what they went on to accomplish.
The thing about “Quality of Hire” is that everyone feels something when they hear it, but we don’t have a universal definition. When we ask, “what is quality of hire?” we are not all answering the same question. All too often, we know it when we experience it, but it is subjective and personal. That is why the concept is flawed. We treat it like a hard metric when, in reality, it is closer to a feeling or shared experience. Even with a formula that reads well, we’re forcing a qualitative experience into something quantitatively inaccurate. There simply, is no conversion.
So let me ask… Is Quality of Hire a metric like NPS? An ops tool like scrum? Or more a philosophy like DevOps?
See? Quality of Hire can break down faster than lost product-market fit, or a founder’s Twitter shenanigans, or a changing compensation philosophy, or an RTO mandate, or an employee’s family responsibilities. (Those variables impact QoH with a heavier degree of influence than any ML in a survey ever could.)
Another reason recruiters shouldn’t concern themselves with Quality of Hire is that it doesn’t serve hiring managers. What do I mean? If you’re a recruiter talking about QoH, with a hiring manager, well without a universal definition there’s no alignment of understanding. Sure you can align on one. But does that mean we should?
It’s wildly inefficient to have a metric with a choose-your-own-adventure definition. Literally no other business group would do this. So why should Recruiting?
Say your hiring manager joins the company having previously worked at an organization that has deployed Quality of Hire. Awesome! They’re committed to mutual accountability for post-hire outcomes! *Air Jump*
Maybe. But if that Recruiting org ran QoH by a different definition, then we’re injecting friction by asking our stakeholder to redefine something they’ve come to have known and deployed. And there you have it, we’ve just lost our audience by causing chaos, not order.
And nothing screams incompetence like creating confusion. And let’s be honest, HR isn’t really well known for Competence. (Remember that whole “seat at the table” it’s been desperate to earn?) Executives like simplifiers, not complicators. And Quality of Hire is objectively complicated. So in 2025, let’s just do better.
I am also a big believer in the Pareto principle: the idea that 20 percent of people drive 80 percent of outcomes. In startups, this holds true more than anywhere else. A handful of high performers can deliver extraordinary impact.
That’s why hiring becomes less about where someone worked, their past job title, or the prestige of their university. It becomes about the impact they have made and can make again. That is the future of hiring: identifying impact specifically and trusting it over signals of pedigree.
I see a future where AI can help us quantify and verify impact with more truth, third-party validation, and data. For now, hiring remains both an art and a science. We have leaned too far into the pseudo-science in recent years. I believe the art, the relationships, the intuition, and the belief in people will win the day.
But for now, let’s focus on the side of Quality of Hire we can all agree on…the stories that uplift one another.
Peace & People Ops,
Brando ✌️
