October 3, 2024
By Chris Harvey
After a rigorous hiring process and multiple rounds of interviews, over 33% of new hires still leave within their first six months.
As recruiters and hiring managers, you try to do everything right to screen candidates and ensure they'll be a great fit for the business and excel in their role, but sometimes, despite your best efforts, an employee just doesn’t work out.
Have you experienced this? You’ve evaluated job candidates, asking for writing samples, conducting role plays, maybe even having them give a short presentation. One candidate absolutely nails it—they stand out from all the rest. Excitedly, you hire them, convinced you've found your next top performer. But a few months later, they’re underperforming, and in some cases, you might even have to let them go within 3–6 months. You’re left wondering how things went so wrong when you did everything “right.”
This exact scenario has happened to me. I hired someone who interviewed exceptionally well, showing all the right skills during the process. Looking back, I wonder if it was less a function of the new hire’s skills, but rather the onboarding process. Maybe I failed to give him the support he needed to start on the right foot.
I found myself wishing for more insight into where he was struggling—insights that might have allowed me to intervene and provide the right feedback at the right time.
Even though I met with him regularly and trained him on the key skills and strategies necessary for success, I kept asking, "How’s it going?" "Do you have any questions?" "How can I help?" And every time, I’d get the same reassuring answers: "Things are going great!" "I’ve got this!" "No worries." I trusted his responses, but later realized I needed more visibility into his real challenges.
Enter Rippling Talent Signal
This is why I was intrigued when I heard about Rippling’s newest solution: Talent Signal. It aims to do what I once thought impossible—accurately and objectively evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your new hires in their first 90 days.
Frankly, I’d be thrilled if it only identified underperformers at risk of failing in their new role, but it does much more than that. It also highlights future top performers and those meeting expectations who will become key contributors to your team.
How does it work? Rippling uses AI to review tangible work outputs during an employee's first 90 days—like code written or customer support calls logged—and offers an unbiased comparison of the employee’s performance against their peers. For the first time, managers can get real, data-driven insights into how their new hires are truly performing.
But here’s the kicker: Talent Signal isn’t just another arbitrary employee score generated by a mysterious algorithm. It gives you concrete, actionable information on where your employees excel or where they may be struggling. It compares their work output to that of your top performers, providing real examples from tools you currently use like GitHub, Salesforce, or Zendesk. This not only allows you to see how they’re doing but gives you the exact examples you can use to coach them more effectively.
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For managers, it’s a productivity booster. It shortens the time it takes for new hires to become fully productive. For recruiters and talent acquisition professionals, it provides invaluable metrics on the quality of hire and time to productivity.
While many HR tech vendors are incorporating AI into their products, it’s often limited to features like enhanced search or chatbot capabilities—surface-level stuff. Rippling Talent Signal, on the other hand, taps into the full potential of AI for HR, offering a truly game-changing use case.
As managers, we often have limited time and visibility. If AI can help us focus our efforts on supporting struggling new hires and recognizing high performers, we’re looking at a major leap forward in employee management. Talent Signal doesn’t replace managerial intuition—it enhances it by pointing us toward the areas where our attention will have the greatest impact. Too often, we rely on gut feelings, backed by too little data. Rippling Talent Signal eliminates that need, offering clear, unbiased insights based on actual performance data.
Of course, data isn’t perfect. But with Talent Signal, you don’t have to spend hours searching for the right examples. I had an employee who once told me I always found the "one time" they made a mistake. With Talent Signal, the guessing game is gone. It surfaces the examples that best represent how an employee is truly performing, good or bad.
This Rippling Talent Signal screenshot demonstrates the simplicity and comprehensive view to how your new hire is performing.
What’s the downside? Well, Rippling Talent Signal is not available for all new hire employee populations. Right now, Rippling Talent Signal is only available to Early Access customers, so it’s not broadly available yet. It’s also designed to evaluate roles with measurable work products, so it currently focuses on software development, customer support, and sales positions.
I’d love to see this expanded to other roles, and I suspect Rippling is already considering how to make that happen. While the first 90 days are crucial, it is easy to see this tool evolving to evaluate all employees in relevant roles and being incorporated into 1:1s and annual performance reviews.
Today many employers feel the labor market is a “buyers’ market” and they have their pick of great talent. However, interest rates are coming down, and the economy is poised for accelerating growth. This will likely return us quickly to tight labor markets where every successful hiring decision is even more critically important to the business.
Tools like Rippling Talent Signal offer a transformative way to maximize your efforts in employee management and hiring. By providing clear, actionable insights into new hires' performance during those critical early months, it helps you not only identify potential underperformers but also nurture future top performers. The result? More informed decisions, better coaching opportunities, and ultimately, a stronger, more productive team. As AI continues to evolve, solutions like Talent Signal are showing us just how much potential there is to reshape the way we manage and develop talent in today’s competitive workforce.
To learn more about Rippling Talent Signal, check out Rippling’s website and stay tuned for updates. This might just be the AI tool that takes employee evaluation to the next level.
Editor’s Note: This newsletter is sponsored by Rippling. We are thankful to get early access to review their impressive new product offering and the opportunity to collaborate with them to bring you today’s newsletter. If you are exploring ways to enhance the success of your hiring and new hire onboarding, we recommend you consider engaging with Rippling to learn more about their solution.