I was sent some information about this new Recruitment Reviews website last week. It's a site where jobseekers can write up their experiences of dealing with recruitment agencies or hiring managers.
It's a very new site and only has a couple of dozen reviews. However, one method they are using to increase content is to encourage companies and agencies to buy profile pages and then they will ask their candidates to leave feedback. Thus highlighting their superb service to other jobseekers. I guess for agencies it's also going to be a marketing tool to allow them to showcase themselves to hiring decision makers.
I like the idea. It's actually similar to a site that's been around for a while called HireScores.com. I know that when that site was set up the founder, Lisette Howlett, initially struggled to get jobseekers to write up the reviews and I suspect that Oliver (founder of Recruitment Reviews) will have similar issues.
Ensuring that reviews are written by genuine jobseekers (rather than by consultants of the recruitment firm) is another issue that needs to be addressed.
However, despite the challenges I am sure Oliver will face, I think it's a worthwhile concept and one which I hope he manages to pull off.
The problem with these sites though Louise (in fact the problem with getting quality feedback as a recruitment company full stop) is that the candidates’ experience of an agency is strongly dependent upon the success of their application.
We get great feedback from people who we placed and people we nearly placed. We get (broadly) good feedback from candidates we’ve spoken to and who have “experienced” our service.
But it’s very, very difficult to give a positive candidate experience to people who have applied for a job for which they are not suitable, or to people we can’t help who have approached us.
We’ve tried everything – replying personally to each applicant with personal feedback as to why they are not being considered, we’ve tried setting up an autoreply which states that if they don’t hear anything they haven’t been successful and we’ve tried not interacting with people who weren’t suitable – and none of these had an effect on the feedback we get from job-seekers who we’re just unable to help.
On the flip side, how many candidates actually choose a recruiter to go and work with? How many have brand (or individual) loyalty to a company/consultant? Whatever the percentage is, it’s small – most are far more concerned with the job than they are the recruitment company themselves.
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These things must be all the rage at the minute, as I submitted a blog entry to the review site at http://www.freelancesupermarket.com (and hopefully they should be posting up more soon!)
That one is slightly different though as you can review the contractors back…
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@Nick Gallimore.
Not true. Some of the best recruiters I worked with I did not get a job through them.
What determines a good vs bad experience with a recruiter is how the candidate perceives that the recruiter cares for the candidate and is on the candidate’s side.
If the candidate has a feel that he’s just a number or the recruiter is just out to make money off the candidate’s skills, then the recruiter will be perceived as bad.
It has nothing to do with whether the candidate receives an offer or not.
[…] wonder why it’s never succeeded before. I wrote about CompareMyRecruiter in 2012 and about Recruitment Reviews and HireScores back in 2009 (all long gone in their previous forms). TalentPuzzle and CompareRecruit are two […]