Over the last month, chances are you have been prompted at least once to review a restaurant, hotel or any one of hundreds of other products or services. The difference, compared with only a few years ago is the broad variety of websites that now request reviews. Some are very specific to the industry that they service, for example, Zomato for restaurants, whereas others are relevant to almost every business, for example, Google Reviews.

You may not have even noticed that reviews are becoming commonplace in the recruitment sector. Again, only a few years ago the only major review site relevant to our industry was Glassdoor, albeit that Glassdoor hasn’t experienced much momentum in Asia-Pacific yet. As of today, the review sites that currently exist and are relevant to recruitment agencies in APAC include Glassdoor, Indeed, Seek, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.

With all of these channels, ever increasing prompts to leave reviews and consumers who are more readily used to reviewing everyday elements of their life, the chance of you or your recruitment business either wittingly or unwittingly receiving reviews is considerably higher than ever before.

As online reviews continue to become more commonplace the reviews that your business has will, without doubt, start to impact your ability to attract top talent and also win new business. Just imagine the day you receive a response to a well thought through RFP stating that the business isn’t proceeding with your agency because of numerous poor online reviews. Obviously, this is an extreme example, but at the other end of the spectrum are really high-quality candidates who elect to work with another Recruiter because they have better or more credible personal LinkedIn reviews (in this case recommendations).

Good News

The good news is that it is relatively easy to position your business in a positive light if you choose to proactively take control of your agency’s brand across core websites or apps. This is because the vast majority of our industry isn’t keeping up to speed with this fast-changing consumer behaviour.

With the exception of LinkedIn, on every other review site, it is nearly impossible to remove or edit unwanted feedback. This means that if left unchecked the probability of your agency’s reviews being negative is high. Even if as a business you pride yourself on excellent service there are bound to be the odd anomalies. This is because people leaving reviews are significantly more likely to have had a negative experience than neutral or positive. The only way to counter this is to actively seek positive reviews on your target channels.

As an individual Recruiter, the simplest way to do this is to always be looking to transfer any positive feedback from candidates or clients into online reviews. Expanding on an earlier point, this generally means encouraging recommendations on the main professional networking channel LinkedIn. As an individual Recruiter, it is absolutely critical to have up-to-date recommendations from relatable candidates and clients.

As a Recruitment Manager or Director obtaining positive reviews is a little trickier and involves greater amounts of up-front planning. In our experience, working with many agencies, we have found the best way to do this is to combine review requests with more commonplace satisfaction surveys. Typically, most agencies these days send out automated or semi-automated requests for feedback to clients and candidates that they have either placed or possibly have just organised interviews for or with. These feedback requests are normally through tools such as Survey Monkey and encompass NPS (Net Promoter Score) questions. The Resulting NPS score and other feedback provide a really good indication of how satisfied with your service that particular customer is. It is then only a small logical leap to send those who have left positive feedback a message requesting them to post this on your chosen review channel. In some businesses, it may also be suitable to incentivise the customer to do this, for example offering a voucher or similar. What is critical is to ensure as much of this process is automated, to maintain a good, consistent experience. There are other methods to encourage positive feedback, for example, you could ask candidates during your initial interviews to consider leaving feedback at a later stage.

Whilst you’re building your businesses’ positive reviews and even once you have them flowing, it is really important to also engage with everyone that takes the time to review your business. This is especially true if you’re unfortunate enough to receive negative reviews. The key here is to show you’re listening, that the issue is being investigated appropriately and to avoid long winded back and forth arguments.

Summary

Hopefully, this article encourages you to at least review the existing online feedback that exists on either yourself or your business. If you are looking at implementing a positive review system please feel free to get in touch.