During the last several years recruiting departments have awakened to a fact understood in other parts of corporate America, effective management requires accurate and timely data. Organizations need to understand exactly where they are on a set of performance benchmarks at any critical juncture and understand what the business ramifications of those metrics are. But in a rush to come up with data, the early efforts of many hiring department's focused on Cost-per-Hire, a statistic that provides a skewed and inaccurate view of success. A hire made, however cheaply, isn't a good hire unless the individual is able to find success and grow in their new role and talent departments that base success on how inexpensively they can make job offers, may be getting exactly what they pay for.

This learning track focuses on a different metric for the Knowledge Economy - Quality of Hire. Through a variety of tools and processes, the best organizations today are gathering and analyzing data that is geared toward understanding their true human capital value. This track will center on how organizations can measure the efforts of their recruiting teams in bringing in the best and brightest, and match up those qualitative assessments with hard dollar figures to gain a true understanding of the success of their talent acquisition efforts.

Most recruiting departments still don't measure quality. Why? Some leaders will say that quality at their organization is different than others, and therefore a formula isn't transportable must be written from scratch. Others will candidly admit that implement the metric is work intensive and they simply haven't the time. These are real concerns, to be sure, but can be overcome with a commitment to the goal of six sigma. So just what can six sigma teach us about quality of hire?