If you work in a recruitment business, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Whether you source candidates or manage those who do.

There are more ways to reach the market than ever and while that makes the job more varied, if your net is not as wide as it should be, potential precious gems can slip past . An enormous part of any good recruiters toolkit is referral business – and the biggest influencer on word of mouth is customer experience.

In a competitive and fast moving landscape you need every advantage going, and for that, you need the best tools at your disposal. Lest you miss the best waters completely and watch the big fish jump right into your competitors’ boats.

The current state of affairs

As if the world changing right before your very eyes wasn’t enough, you’ve now got a shifting market too.

According to SEEK, job ad volume has reduced in almost all industries in the last 12 months. Dropping by almost 20% in April YoY. And across the site, application numbers increased by 8% per ad.

There’s fewer jobs and far more candidates. Which means fewer contracts for recruiters and more competition.

But that won’t worry you if you’ve got great relationships with your clients and are easily findable for top candidates.

If what, and how you sell, are both great, you’re set.

A huge part of achieving those things is being visible. Visibly good, and knowing the ins and outs of the experience you provide, both as a reputation tool and to inform development.

 

Enter NPS stage left

West Recruitment, a boutique white collar agency, take ownership of all aspects of their reputation through a combination of Sourcr Reviews and by using the NPS tool.

You’re probably across what a Net Promoter Score (NPS) is, measuring the likelihood of referrals from your customer base based on their experience. The candidates and clients you speak to day in, day out.

Those you place and those you don’t.

How do you think they’d rate you from 0-10? If that terrifies you, you’re exactly who needs it.

Sadly this is what many recruitment businesses are failing to ask. And in doing so, the service you provide gains more recognition, more improvement, more business, better candidates and greater success.

Two years ago, West Recruitment started asking candidates what they thought, both those they placed and those they didn’t – because every experience counts.

I know what you’re thinking, “that sounds like a lot of work?!” Well, not in this case. They started using a rapid, ludicrously easy-to-use feature on Sourcr.

West Recruitment understands the importance of both sides of feedback, reviews for brand promotion and the NPS survey to improve internal performance and develop their teams.

NPS always has potential to grow and gives you a far wider net than you would’ve without using one. Not just for winning new business and placing candidates, but for retaining valuable clients that can take much energy to gain initially.

Knowing and improving your NPS is more important than ever in a jobs-led market. Every touch point counts, and leaders can’t always be across every element of recruiter activity. With an NPS tool though, they can identify processes and practices which can be improved.

 

There are two crucial benefits of feedback – collecting reviews to win new business, and tracking NPS to improve your business. 

We spoke to Helen White, Marketing & Communications manager from West Recruitment on why they value the combination of public reviews and NPS.

“We’d initially been using the other parts of the Sourcr platform for some time which we had seen benefits from, so moving forward to include the NPS arm of the product was a no brainer. The initial set up was incredibly quick and seamless and it really is so simple to manage.

After the consultants make a placement, review requests are sent out automatically and replies can be managed easily and efficiently.

Further, we believed we would also get valuable insight from the candidates who we didn’t place during a recruitment process, and thus we configured the NPS set up to include these candidates too. This gives us all sorts of feedback and it’s a very good differentiator and training aid.

“Sourcr has undoubtedly helped us attract new candidates, clients and potential new staff. With the volume of reviews we have gathered now, it certainly enables us to show that we are a reputable agency and that the ‘’proof is in the pudding’’ so to speak. Over time this social proof has improved the reputation of the business, the team and the overall brand” said Helen.

Helen explained West Recruitment see tangible benefits from both receiving inbound enquiry off the back of their public Sourcr profile and using the NPS tool to build training programs and processes. 

“The NPS feature allows us to understand the customer journey, and in turn that allows us to build better training and identify potential weaknesses in our processes that we may not have been aware of. It really gives us the confidence to know we’re covering all bases and through the feedback we can proactively drive positive improvements.” This helps with overall staff development and even retention as well.

The most successful companies are the ones who are constantly looking for ways to improve, who are open to all feedback, whether it’s negative, constructive or glowing. 

The end.

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Don’t want it to be the end for you?

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**Click here** and you’ll find the absurdly rapid, ludicrously easy-to-use tools which made West Recruitment easy money and helped them hone of the best reputations in the game.

Wherever you work in the recruitment business, your bottom line will thank you for it.