Kit and your HR system
Your HR system knows who stayed. Kit helps you hire more people like them.
Speak to Kit is an AI hiring system built for quality of hire. The hiring manager says what a top performer delivers in their first 12 months, Kit speaks to every applicant about the way they work, and the hiring team sees who to meet, and why. How Kit works, step by step.
What HR systems say they hold
HiBob describes itself as a "Core HR system of record" and offers to "Track engagement, retention, and headcount in real time". BambooHR says it "brings all your employee, payroll, time, and benefit information together".
An HR system holds what happens after the offer: start dates, pay, reviews, moves between teams and who left. It is the best record a company has of which hires worked out. That record rarely reaches the people choosing the next hire.
The question most employers never close
The CIPD's 2026 Resourcing and Talent Planning survey asked 1,014 UK HR professionals what they check. Three in ten measure the performance or retention of new hires in their first year. Only 7% check whether their hiring methods actually predict success.
Ratings alone do not settle it either. Two managers rating the same person agree only about half the time, a correlation of .52. So a useful check asks specific questions about specific hires, at set points, and keeps the answers.
How Kit closes the loop
On the Talent and Enterprise plans, Kit checks with the manager and with the new hire at 30 days, 90 days and a year: who is doing well, who stayed and who grew. The check-ins are part of a top performance hiring model built with each company, with bespoke professional services, and what it costs is agreed with each company. They are not part of the Try Kit plan. What Kit learns goes into the next top performer profile for that team.
Before those dates arrive, there are earlier signals. Kit shows how often a company's hiring managers agree with its recommendations, and how many interviews each hire took. Over time, quality of hire can be reported for the whole company, each team and each site.
What the research says about who stays
Ability barely tells you who will quit, according to a review of 42 studies by Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner, with a correlation of .01. Whether the job matched what the person expected matters far more. A later review of 52 studies, by Earnest, Allen and Landis in 2011, found that being honest about the hard parts of a job keeps more people, mainly because they trust the employer.
That is why every advert Kit writes names the hard part of the job, and why Kit asks every applicant about it on the call. People who would not enjoy that part can see it before they apply.
The stakes go up in 2027. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal in the UK drops from two years to six months, so the first months of a hire matter more than they did.
What Kit needs from your HR system
Speak to Kit links to any HRIS, and Workday and SAP SuccessFactors are live today. The HR system stays the record of who works there. Kit does not replace it, and it does not run reviews, pay or payroll.
What Kit adds is the link between the two ends of hiring. The conversation each person had before they were hired sits beside how they are doing a year later, so the next profile for that team starts from what actually happened.
Why the first year is worth measuring
In 2023, 16.5% of UK workers had been with their employer for under 12 months, by Speak to Kit's own sum from the ONS Annual Population Survey. That is a snapshot, not a failure rate, but it shows how much of any workforce is in its first year at once.
A new person also takes time to reach full output. Oxford Economics, working for Unum in 2014, put it at about 28 weeks across five sectors, and found most of the cost of replacing someone was lost output while the new person got up to speed.
What a quality of hire report can show
Once the checks are running, a company can answer questions its HR system holds the raw facts for but cannot answer alone.
- Which teams hire people who are doing well a year later.
- Which sources bring the hires who stay.
- How often hiring managers agreed with Kit, and how that compared with the outcome.
- Whether interviews per hire went down as the profiles got sharper.
What it is worth
An HR system records who leaves. Speak to Kit works on why. In UK small firms, 16 in 100 new hires leave within their first year. For a company hiring about 150 people a year, that's about 24 hires that don't work out, at about £51,000 each on an £80,000 salary: about £1.2 million a year. Each one avoided is worth about £51,000. In a Leadership IQ study of more than 20,000 hires, 89 in 100 of the hires that failed were down to attitude and fit, not skills, which is what Kit asks about before anyone gets an offer. For example, an online grocer hiring about 2,400 people a year has about 380 first-year leavers, costing about £7.7 million a year. Halving that would be worth about £3.8 million a year (estimate).