Assessing quality of hire has long been a challenge for the HR industry. In fact, it’s historically been the top consideration for employers when evaluating the return on investment (ROI) for any new technology. This is mostly because it appears at first glance to be one of the more complicated metrics—it’s subject to employee performance reviews, evaluation scores, and turnover rates, and can be based on factors particular to your organizational needs. Basically it answers the question: Does a new hire add value to a company over the long haul? When you build a quality workforce, your efficiency, and growth as a company increase overall—the ultimate return on investment.

This long-term strategy focus, however, does not have to come at the expense of those two other very important hiring metrics: time to hire and cost per hire. While these more straightforward metrics easily quantify the passage of time and disappearing dollars in the heat of a job campaign, the emphasis on quality of hire suggests that employers expect their tech investments to have long-term results. But taken together with the quality of hire, these other two metrics exist in symbiosis within the hiring landscape. If you push on one metric too far, the other two may suffer. So, if you focus solely on the quality of hire, you can easily spend more job campaign dollars to get your ads featured or take a long time to find the perfect candidate.

In an ideal world, you would be able to push all three metrics to optimize your hiring efficiency and maximize effectiveness by hiring quality, long-lasting employees. This is the beauty of programmatic recruitment, which employs automated processes and incorporates data for AI-assisted decision-making. This tech not only has the ability to manage your budget through automated processes, but it also targets quality candidates, reducing time to hire and upping candidate quality.

While 41% of employers say that tech stack ROI is about improving quality of hire, the service providers of this tech view the ROI focus as reducing cost per hire. In fact, 30% of service providers cite cost as the key factor in determining ROI.

This shows a clear disconnect between employers and service providers. Is it just the case that service providers don’t know what their clients want? Not exactly. The two perspectives show the range with which you can determine ROI when it comes to your tech. For the service provider, showing immediate results like reduced cost per hire may justify the investment quickly, so employers stick with the service and discover the long-term ROI later. If service providers focused on quality of hire, it may take years for employers to truly grasp the full picture of this improved metric. Employers want to see results and service providers want them to see the immediate results too.

Investment in new tech comes with further challenges for employers when determining programmatic ROI. While 42% of respondents cite “cutting through the hype” as their greatest challenge when evaluating new tech, 29% said the biggest challenge was communicating the value to other stakeholders. But perhaps most importantly when it comes to implementation, 27% cited the biggest problem is understanding how new tech will work and integrate with their old tech.

For programmatic recruitment, it’s vital that you find a solution that offers integration with your current tech, like pandoIQ. If you’re looking at programmatic ROI and the long haul, incorporating your pre-existing tech into an automated system adds more value to your tech stack overall; in those famous words of Aristotle, “The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.” Unifying your tech and avoiding silos is simply more efficient, but it will also add value to the tech you currently use. For example, if you use an ATS as many HR professionals do, the data housed in that system alone becomes a valuable recruitment resource and an important source of information for programmatic recruitment platforms to create strategic job ad campaigns based on your data.

Will programmatic recruitment increase your quality of hire? Yes, but it will do so much more—from reducing cost per hire and time to hire to seamless integration with your existing tech while leveraging data. When you think about programmatic ROI and new tech, it is important to consider the long term effects of the investment. But why not also see immediate results and the ROI at every step of the hiring process?