Hires from a pool of 100000
Most companies measure hiring the way they measure a delivery service: how fast, how cheap, how many boxes shipped. Time-to-fill and cost-per-hire answer those questions well. Neither one tells you if the person you hired was actually good at the job.
That’s what a quality of hire questionnaire is for. It’s a set of structured questions, asked of the right people at the right time, that turns “I think this was a good hire” into an actual score you can track, compare, and act on. Talent acquisition professionals now rank quality of hire as the No. 1 topic that will shape recruiting over the next five years, according to LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting report, and it’s also the metric most of them admit they can’t measure consistently. Below is a full questionnaire you can start using this week, plus the research behind why each question is on the list.
A quality of hire questionnaire is a structured set of questions, usually rated on a simple scale, that different people answer about a new hire at set points after they start. The goal is to separate how well someone is actually performing from how fast or cheap it was to hire them.
Society of Human Resources (SHRM) calls this the difference between efficiency metrics and effectiveness metrics. Time-to-fill and cost-per-hire are efficiency metrics: they measure the recruiting process, not the outcome. Quality of hire is an effectiveness metric: it measures whether the hiring decision was actually right. A 2026 SHRM framework defines it more specifically as performance ratings at six and 12 months, time-to-productivity, retention rates, and manager satisfaction scores, customized to what “good” means for that specific role.
If you want the full breakdown of the metric itself, our guide to quality of hire covers the definition in depth. This piece is the practical version: the actual questions to ask.
Most companies that try to measure quality of hire ask one vague question, months later, from one person: the hiring manager. That approach misses most of what actually predicts whether a hire works out.
Leadership IQ tracked more than 20,000 new hires across 312 organizations and found that 46% of new hires fail within 18 months, where “failure” meant a manager wouldn’t hire that person again, they left under pressure, or they received serious negative performance reviews. Here’s the part that should change how you write your questionnaire: 89% of those failures traced back to attitude, not technical skill. Specifically, coachability accounted for 26% of failures, emotional intelligence 23%, motivation 17%, and temperament 15%. Technical competence, the thing most interviews spend the most time testing, accounted for just 11%.
A questionnaire built only around “did they hit their targets” never catches most of that. It also relies on a single rater. Interview scores are already inconsistent across hiring managers before someone’s even hired, and that same inconsistency shows up again when it’s time to rate performance. A real quality of hire questionnaire pulls from four different vantage points, not one, and asks about attitude and fit as directly as it asks about output.
Use these across four categories. Each category has a different rater and a different best time to ask. Score each question on a simple 1-5 scale so you can average results into a single quality of hire index per hire, per team, or per recruiter.
1. Would you hire this person again, knowing what you know now?
2. How does their performance compare to others who started in a similar role?
3. Are they meeting the specific goals set for this position?
4. How long did it take them to reach full productivity in the role?
5. Has anything about their day-to-day work surprised you, positively or negatively?
6. Do you have the tools and resources you need to do your job well?
7. Do you understand how your role connects to your team’s goals?
8. Does the actual work match what you expected based on the interview process?
9. Have you gotten the feedback you need to know where you stand?
10. Would you recommend a friend apply for a similar role on this team?
11. Does this person contribute effectively in team settings?
12. Have they built real working relationships with the team?
13. Do they ask for help or input when they need it?
14. Have they added a skill, perspective, or way of working the team was missing?
15. Would you want this person on your next project?
16. Is this hire still with the company at the 6-month and 12-month marks?
17. Has this hire required a performance improvement plan or disciplinary action?
18. How does this hire’s coachability and adaptability compare to your team’s top performers?
19. Did their actual on-the-job skills match what was assessed during hiring?
20. Is this hire on track for a raise, promotion, or expanded scope within 18 months?
That last category matters more than most companies treat it. Stacey Gordon, an executive advisor cited in LinkedIn’s own research, points out that new studies show full ramp-up can take up to 18 months, not the 90 days most companies still assume. A questionnaire that only checks in once at 90 days and stops is measuring quality of hire before it’s finished happening.
Question 19, on whether pre-hire assessment matched actual performance, is also the feedback loop most companies skip entirely. If your candidate screening software scored someone highly on skills or fit, this is where you find out if that score meant anything. ScaleScreen, the AI screening layer from Savos, keeps the reasoning behind each pre-hire score on record specifically so it can be checked against what this questionnaire finds out later, instead of that context disappearing the moment someone gets an offer.
Don’t send all 20 questions to every rater at once. Route each category to the person who can actually answer it, and only at the checkpoint where the answer means something.
• Assign an owner per category. Hiring managers answer category one, new hires answer category two, peers answer category three, and HR or your HRIS pulls category four from existing records. No one should be guessing at a question meant for someone else.
• Score consistently. Use the same 1-5 scale across every question so results average cleanly into one number. Structured, AI-powered scorecards applied earlier in the hiring process already prove that consistent scoring beats gut-feel ratings, and the same logic holds post-hire.
• Track it by recruiter and by source. Once you have scores across enough hires, break them down by who recruited the candidate and where they came from. This is how you find out that one channel produces high scorers who quit within a year, which is a retention problem hiding inside a quality problem. Predictive analytics on flight risk can catch that pattern before it shows up in your 12-month numbers.
• Connect it to a number leadership cares about. A quality of hire score that never touches revenue, retention cost, or productivity stays a talent acquisition exercise. Tying it to those outcomes is also how you make the business case for the hiring tools and process changes that actually improve the score next time.
• Don’t skip the unstructured cost. Companies that never formalize this process aren’t just missing data. They’re absorbing the hidden costs of unstructured hiring that show up as rework, disengagement, and quiet turnover no one connects back to the hiring decision.
What is a quality of hire questionnaire?
It’s a structured set of rated questions, asked of hiring managers, new hires, peers, and pulled from HR data, at set points after someone starts. It turns a subjective impression of “good hire” into a comparable score.
When should I send a quality of hire questionnaire?
At minimum, three checkpoints: 90 days for early signal, 6 months once the role has settled, and 12 months for the full picture. New hire self-assessment questions work best even earlier, at 30 and 60 days.
Who should answer a quality of hire questionnaire?
No single person. Use the hiring manager for performance and fit, the new hire for onboarding and role-clarity signals, peers for team-fit and 360-style feedback, and HR data for retention and objective performance flags.
What’s the difference between quality of hire and time-to-hire?
Time-to-hire measures how fast you filled the role. Quality of hire measures whether the person you filled it with was actually the right call. A fast hire and a good hire are not the same thing, and optimizing only for speed can quietly work against quality.
How many questions should a quality of hire questionnaire have?
Twenty, split across four categories of five, is enough to cover performance, attitude, team fit, and retention without becoming a survey nobody finishes. Cut categories that don’t apply to a given role rather than shortening every category evenly.
Can quality of hire actually be turned into one score?
Yes. Average the 1-5 ratings within each category, then average the four category scores into a single index per hire. That index is what you track over time, by recruiter, by source, and by team.
