How often do you find yourself retuning a meal at a restaurant? Not that often, right? In fact, it’s usually only when the food has a pretty big issue: maybe it tastes terrible or is severely under-cooked. I think this serves as a perfect analogy for involuntary turnover.

Most leaders use this metric as a measure of success. However, we often only resort to letting someone go when it’s a very obvious misstep. Since employees are not truly assessed for quality, many of the lesser quality hires (inefficient workers, poor culture fits, or just plain “not meant for the job”) are kept to dawdle away precious company time and resources.

And just like the range in quality we find with restaurant food, the range of quality in employees varies greatly. With meals, sometimes you have a simple dinner out that you have pretty much forgotten by the next day. It wasn’t fantastically delicious or wonderfully memorable. It was just a meal (where you didn’t send back your plate). Other times, perhaps you enjoy an amazing feast that wowed you with gorgeous plating and scrumptious taste combinations; a meal you remember years later. And so is the range of quality in employees. There is the rockstar performer who sets the bar high, making great leadership decisions and propelling the company forward, versus the lollygag follower who stomps into work performing the bare minimum of necessary duties.

Unfortunately, the state of Talent measurement today makes it so that as an HR leader you unable to distinguish between a run-of-the-mill meal and 3-star Michelin rated feast.

We all need to do a better job of measuring the quality of talent if we want our organizations to rise to the next level. We started Checkster to provide ways to measure quality that go way beyond involuntary turnover. Think how grey the world would be if the only measure of the quality of food was based on whether a plate was returned to the kitchen…