Yesterday afternoon I spoke with Justin Finch, Operations Director, of executivesontheweb (eotw). I first ought to point out that it’s now clear that the eotw "league table" is completely different from Jobsite’s RecruitRank. I hope to catch up with Jobsite today so will post more on RecruitRank later.
Back to eotw.
Justin told me the system was implemented after a great deal of feedback from candidates saying their biggest complaint about consultancies is the lack of response they get when applying for a vacancy via a job board.
The objective of the feedback league table was to encourage consultancies to respond to candidates. When a candidate applies for a job on eotw the recruiter gets an email. eotw have implemented a new stage here where the recruiter can hit a "feedback button" saying yes or no as to whether the candidate is "initially" suitable. The eotw system then sends an appropriate standard letter to the candidate.
Basically, if you have 1 job with 100 applicants and you respond to 80 of them using the "feedback button" that’s classed as 80% feedback rate. There is no actual "feedback" from candidates involved.
To be number one you need to respond to every single application using the feedback button. The limitation of the system is around consultancies who use a third party to post jobs (eg, Broadbean) or use an automated service to download their CVs. Or if the CVs are downloaded by a support person who isn’t in a position to say if a candidate is initially suitable. Additionally, just because the consultancy isn’t using the eotw "feedback button" it doesn’t mean they aren’t responding directly to every single candidate. However, once an advertiser understands the system, and if they want to appear at the top of the league table, they could be "playing the game" and clicking the yes/no button to acknowledge candidate response. Really, everyone who wants to be can be in the number one slot. The idea behind the system is admirable but unfortunately has a major flaw in that those recruiters that give 100% response by other means get rated bottom of the table. I wonder if this can be overcome by an amend to the system.
The web page with the feedback table on (http://www.executivesontheweb.com/response/league.cfm) has now been amended to make it clearer for what the recruiters are being ranked.
By the way, at the end of the year they will be presenting certificates to the top 3 companies in the league table to acknowledge their performance.
