How to Draw Correlation Between Hiring Practices and Performance of Remote Software Engineers

by Muoro Io Build Remote Engineering Teams

Hiring is rightly treated as one of, if not the most important parts of a company’s operations. It is how you get great talent to join your ranks to spurr new ideas and take your organization to new heights.

remote engineering teams

However, things that are important always run the risk of turning into islands in themselves. They are treated as standalone activities that fulfill their own objectives. Sadly, recruitment is often one such case. Hiring is often siloed to the point where its overall impact on the company’s bottom line is rarely even discussed, much less measured.

This is especially harrowing when we read it against the fact that 50% of all new hires turn out to be duds within 18 months, and that each hire can cost a company as much as $50,000. Tracing candidate performance to the hiring process is hard, but possible with some forethought and legwork.

What is Quality of Hire

In the world of metrics, Quality of Hire, or QoH is an odd duck. On the one hand, it seems like the holy grail of performance measurement as it could help you figure out how to recruit to drive business-wide productivity. And yet, it’s the least well established, although not without reason.

Quality has always been the antithesis to quantity. While the latter is easy to measure, quality is inherently subjective, meaning what may be high quality to one person may mean nothing to another.

That being said, there are some metrics and tools that have been successfully used here. Quality of Hire as a concept therefore consists of multiple indicators, methods, and formulas that companies can tailor to their needs. The basic definition of QoH is the value that a new hire is adding to the organization.

Companies that set up remote software engineering teams have a bigger incentive to invest in establishing their QoH even more than companies that use inhouse employees only. Hiring offshore developers can be tough, given the cultural, language, and expectation differences between the employer and employees making establishing baseline parameters extremely important.

Measuring Your Quality of Hire

Even though the formula for QoH is pretty much standard across industries, it’s challenging primarily because everyone uses variables that suit them best.

Some of the variables that can be used here are time to productivity, revenue generated, cultural fit, new hire engagement and value alignment. It’s best to come up with a percentage value for each here.

The formula for QoH is:

(Variable 1 + Variable 2 +......Variable N) / Number of Variables

So, if you were to use to use time to time to new hire performance, revenue generated, and cultural fit to measure your QoH the formula will look something like:

New Hire Performance: 85%
Revenue Generated: 70%
Cultural Fit: 90%

QoH = (85% + 70% + 90%) / 3

QoH = 81.6

This figure can be compared to your inhouse historical performance to identify improvement opportunities. You can also use the same formula to gauge the performance of entire batches of recruits, too. A high QoH means your recruitment efforts are efficient and on track.

Let Us Help You Build a Dedicated Software Development Team

At Muoro we don’t follow a cookie cutter approach to recruiting. We understand that each client we onboard has unique requirements and we identify key metrics ideal for them. Our Engineer-as-a-Service model is built from the ground up to be flexible so that we can create tailored software development teams faster and more affordably than anyone else. For more info, visit: www.muoro.io