3 key reasons why recruitment needs a reviews website

The review culture permeates every industry in 2017. Guests are able to rate food and hospitality companies. Home owners are able to recommend and vet tradespeople. Employees can rate their employer. Heck, students can even rate their teachers online. Yet, there is no obvious place where clients and candidates can rate their recruiter.

Type “Rate my recruiter” into Google and the top search result is a website straight out of the year 2000. The objective of RatetheRecuiters.com is admirable – “to document the procedures, behaviour and effectiveness displayed by recruiters through direct feedback from candidates” – but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

With a distinct lack of competition, it would be difficult to criticise RateTheRecruiters.com too harshly, UNTIL NOW! Widening our search, we were heartened to find a start-up set to change that, RecommenedRecruiter.com a Checkatrade of the recruitment industry if you will.

As luck would have it, we found Recommended Recruiter right here, working from the very same Bristol building we do.

RecommendedRecruiter.com is set with an imminent launch, and here’s why we’re right behind their venture and mission to help “good recruiters stand out from the crowd”

1. Opposing arguments are weak 

There is a fear within the industry that candidates will “throw recruiters under the bus” if they don’t get the job – taking out their frustrations by leaving unduly harsh reviews online. However, we like to think that people are not so readily inclined to blemish a consultant’s professional record without good reason.

The vast majority of the reviews on platforms like TripAdvisor and Glassdoor would appear to have some substance, i.e. they have been submitted for the right reasons. There are always going to be exceptions, but perhaps a right of reply could help guard against unsubstantiated criticism?

2. It’ll promote credible recruiters

As Social Talent’s Johnny Campbell explained in his webinar ‘3 Trends Shaping the Future of Recruitment’, credible recruiters will benefit from a review portal.

“If you’re a good recruiter, you’re going to love these tools because they’re going to give you a quantified edge. You’ll get all the business, all the trust, all the candidates working with you, trusting you about the organisation you’re either working with or representing,” Campbell said.

Recruiters that are less credible or less authoritative, could suffer, he added. But by doing right by their candidates, they could quickly turn their reputation around. It’s not a stretch, then, to suggest that a review portal could raise standards across the industry.

3. Reputation is king

We’ve touched on this already. Before people choose a service or product, they want social proof that the business they are opting for can pass muster. In 2017, ‘reputation is king’, as Campbell puts it.

This trend for online reviews is not going anywhere, and will only get stronger. As it stands, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, according to BrightLocal’s review survey from last year.

The report is chock-full of findings of that nature. Over half of people will visit a website after reading positive reviews, while nearly three quarters said that positive reviews make them trust a business more.

It’s clear that reviews matter to people. And for as long as the recruitment industry shies away from them, people will continue to believe that recruiters are questionable in terms of service quality, morality and reliability. It’s really time we did something about that, don’t you think?

Here at Revoco we’ve taken a giant step forward with this principle but are by no means there yet.  We ask our candidates to “rate” our consultants at the end of the process by asking them a few quick-fire questions in our online survey tool. We then use these scores to check quality, amend our approach, but more interestingly, it impacts our consultant’s remuneration. We call it our “Being Brilliant Bonus” or the “Triple B” – do an excellent job representing our brand and our client’s brand and your commission is higher. It’s all about driving behavior. We would love to find a platform to share these scores, and have high hopes for our neighbours, Recommended Recruiter.

Watch this space…