Mark Linnville, head of talent at Garner Health—a platform to help employees find the doctors they need—uses a proactive and systematic method for measuring and refining hiring practices. “There is standard performance data that you are able to track through review cycles, but that is largely too lagging to make a difference quickly enough,” Linnville explains.

Instead, his team focuses on early indicators that provide faster feedback loops. At Garner, they track metrics tied to onboarding processes, particularly “time to productivity,” which allows them to generate quality assessments much sooner and make adjustments to their hiring process in real time.

This data-driven approach starts by building a clear “competency structure” that acts as a shared language throughout the organization. “Generally, our process is to first establish what the philosophy of performance is, then focus almost maniacally on Garner’s competency structure,” Linnville notes.