New Hire Productivity Measurement

Onboarding is killing your velocity, not hiring. Most #GCCs obsess over offer rollouts and interview velocity. Then Day 1 arrives and your star hire spends 2 weeks hunting VPN tokens, tool access and “who owns what.” That’s not culture; that’s a latency tax. What to fix (and what to measure): Time to First Meaningful Commit (TTFMC): Target: ≤ 7 days for engineers; ≤ 10 days for analysts to ship a first insight. If you don’t track it, you’re guessing. Access in One Hour, Not One Week: Pre-provision prod-safe sandboxes, repos, dashboards, experiment tools. If it needs an email chain, it needs a policy change. Onboarding Pods, Not Orientation Decks: Pair every new hire with a buddy + product owner + SRE for 14 days. Goal: one real task shipped, one pager rotation shadowed. 90-Day “Evidence > Excuses” Plan: Week 1: ship something tiny. Week 2–4: own a bug class or dashboard. Day 30–90: lead one small change end-to-end (with a post-ship write-up). Kill the Tool Maze: Publish a single launcher (links, creds, APIs, logs, style guides). If your new hire needs to ask “where is X?” twice, the doc is broken. Scoreboard to make this real (post it publicly in the #GCC): TTFMC median (weekly) % new hires shipping in Week 1 Access SLA met in 60 minutes Drop-off in “where is…” tickets after 30 days Bottom line: If Day 1–30 is chaos, your “cost arbitrage” evaporates into backfills and burnout. Make onboarding a product. Ship value in Week 1. Everything else is theatre

Boards must do a better job of holding senior leaders accountable for hiring rigor. Hiring impacts every aspect of organizational success, yet accountability often stops short of asking the right questions or tracking meaningful data. Boards can change this by focusing on these areas: What percentage of hires meet or exceed performance expectations in their first year? This metric evaluates the effectiveness of hiring processes in identifying high-performing talent. If a significant percentage of hires underperform, boards must challenge HR leaders to re-examine their sourcing and assessment strategies. What is the hiring manager satisfaction score? Engage hiring managers in post-hire surveys. This data reveals whether HR is delivering candidates aligned with the role's needs and cultural fit. A low score often signals misalignment between hiring strategies and real-world requirements. What’s the time-to-productivity rate for new hires? Tracking how quickly new employees become fully productive measures onboarding effectiveness along with candidate quality and fit for role. A lengthy ramp-up period can indicate gaps in candidate preparation or poor onboarding structures. What is the diversity breakdown of recent hires? Boards must ensure HR is not just hiring quickly but equitably. Regularly scrutinize diversity metrics and the sourcing pipelines feeding the organization. How often are external hires outperforming internal promotions? If external hires consistently outperform, it’s a red flag about internal talent development and succession planning. Boards should demand a clear strategy for internal mobility. Boards that ask these questions and monitor these metrics empower HR to elevate hiring standards and ensure long-term business success. Accountability starts with metrics that matter. Learn more by reading the Talent Sherpa substack at https://buff.ly/Qc912Sn Watch the Talent Sherpa Podcast at: https://buff.ly/sgT7zY5 or Listen on Apple https://buff.ly/LYC2lSm or Spotify https://buff.ly/hiCsDOG

How one company is triangulating quality of hire ⬇️ Carmel Galvin, Chief People Officer at Klaviyo, shared the three key focus areas they look at to measure quality of hire. Instead of tracking dozens of disconnected metrics, they focused on three key areas: 1. Time-to-value metrics - Sales: Days to first quota attainment - Engineering: Time to first PR - Support: Time to handle tickets independently 2. Manager feedback loop - Direct manager rating vs team baseline - Skip-level assessment (manager's manager) - Clear expectations set during onboarding 3. Leading indicators - 30/60/90 day milestone completion - Peer feedback on collaboration - Onboarding satisfaction scores The magic? They back-tested this framework against 6 months of hires and found it highly predictive of future performance. Too many companies try to measure everything and end up measuring nothing well. Pick your core metrics. Test them. Iterate. What metrics do you use to evaluate quality of hire? Drop them below. Link to the full episode from MPL Live Boston in the comments. #HR #CHRO #ChiefPeopleOfficer #Podcast