There’s a new site launched where job seekers and employers can submit their own and read other’s reviews about recruitment agencies. It’s called CompareMyRecruiter.com and is aimed at improving industry standards and helping people make more informed decisions when choosing and working with recruitment agencies in future.
It was launched by an ex-recruitment consultant who came up with the idea upon realising “just how bad the general perception industry appeared to be – and knowing that in many instances this perception was inaccurate”.
They are hoping for similar success to sites such as TripAdvisor – where reviews are plentiful and where affected businesses have had to improve their service or simply lose out.
Whilst I can’t fault the idea of a site where recruiters are named and shamed and then clean up their act, or where brilliant agencies are given the credit they deserve I can’t help but wonder why similar sites haven’t worked. I wrote about Recruitment Reviews over two years ago and from what I can see there are still only 97 recruitment companies listed on the site – many without reviews.
Are Recruitment Agency comparison sites something that can be made to work?
Whilst recruitment agencies may appear to have a good or bad reputation, that reputation has been established by individual recruiters.
As a candidate, I would prefer to see a database of the very best recruiters in the UK.
For example, if I was a chartered accountant in Manchester, I would like to know which recruiters were established as the very best in that location and sector. I would then focus my attention on them, and disregard the rest.
I guess the reason is not so much about the agencies not wanting to sign up, it’s just there’s a lack of motivation for employers to rate them.
We’ve had employer ratings on TalentPuzzle since inception and we get some, but not as many as we’d like. And we’re a platform that employers are using everyday to manage their agency recruitment.
What we started using to recommend effective agencies was not the reviews, but the data we collect on transactions between employers and agencies – which is actually objective data about the number of CVs submitted, the number of interviews held, and the number of placements.
This works because it happens without any need for the employer to go out of their way to rate them.
Obviously at TalentPuzzle we think the idea of helping employers avoid poor agencies is a great one, but the recruiter comparison sites will struggle unless they can work out what is in it for the employer to rate the agencies
I think Stephen is spot on, it is all about the individual recruiter and not the agency. One of the simpliest ways to guage who is good and who is not is via LinkedIn. If they have decent recommendations (and not just from their colleagues!) then that should be a good guide to their ability to deliver.
Nothing wrong with the concept but the whole design and UI of this site just screams “we’ve been set up to make money from Agencies” There is nothing here that I can see that helps the user and a review site that has no reviews on it isn’t going to get any traction. Would be interested to know more about how Comparemyrecruiter intends to get the user generated content it will need to be succesful?
To give you an idea of the scale of the challenge with an example that is vaguely from our industry…Glassdoor is now running as a commercial successful business but has had to amass 2 million individual pieces of user generated content to do so.
In 2010 I had the same idea, and even went as far as purchasing the domain comparerecruiters.com (take a look and be in awe of the beautiful holding page) but the whole concept of setting up the site to be a fair and honest reflection of the industry was another kettle of fish altogether.
How can it be policed to accurately reflect how an agency operates? As the other comments state, it is the individual recruiter who dictates a good, bad or utterly horrendous experience.
The idea of a comparison site is to provide value for money on identical products (insurance, credit cards etc. With Trip Adviser it allows the consumer to “vent spleen” about holidays/hotels. Pictures can be uploaded and horror stories shared.
With a recruiter comparison site site I think we are venturing into another area altogether.
The whole concept is flawed. There is nothing to stop a recruitment agency “rating themselves” with made up candidates who have had the most fantastic phantom experiences and there is also nothing to stop a competitor from discrediting another agency.
I would probably agree that Linkedin is the way forward, but again recommendations from what could be friends should be taken lightl, plus does the average Joe in the Street use Linkedin like Recruitment Industry Professionals do?
It’s a right old quandary, and if anyone can think round it – let me know !!!
Check out Hiring Hub (http://www.hiring-hub.com)
At first glance, this website is not for reviewing your experience with recruitment agencies rather it provides support to them as a business development tool, their words not mine.
I had really disappointing experience with a recruitment agent who was awful person who was extremely vindictive. I would have liked to forget the experience but I am still hearing things reports of her bad mouthing me..to my old manager, really?! He knows I am good employee, why say it? I digress, who should I have spoke n to about that. where can I of reviewed the recruitment agency? I do think there is a need for a comparison website for positive and negative experiences to be reviewed.
[…] behind the seem really nice) I’d 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 […]
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