The Savage Truth

Guess what? Candidates are customers too!

Last week I blogged on the importance of customer service in the recruitment industry, and how Aquent is surveying customer satisfaction, and rewarding our staff based on customer feedback

My story was picked up by recruitment journalists in Australia and the UK, and I have been fascinated by the feedback this concept has received. Comments on my blog are all favorable, but I have also had feedback that the concept is flawed because our staff ’will be worrying about satisfying customers instead of focussing on making money’. In particular, some critics regard spending too much time on candidates as foolhardy because, in the words of one individual, ‘Candidates don’t pay your fees’.

Frankly, this kind of comment gives me tremendous encouragement. That competitors in the staffing industry can be so naive, and so blind to the power of referral, recommendation and repeat business, driven by satisfied customers, makes me very confident about the future of Aquent, and the careers of our staff.

Two days after my blog, came an article in the Australian on-line newsletter Recruiter Daily. Robert Godden, a HR consultant with People Magic conducted research that involved collecting 85 job ads (50 with agencies, 35 with employers), all of which invited potential applicants to call a specific person for more information.

In the course of making 85 phone calls, Godden was only able to reach seven of the nominated contacts, all of whom were from agencies.He left 76 messages for the remaining recruiters (after two numbers rang out).The “unbelievable” result of the experiment was that only seven recruiters returned Godden’s calls — less than 10 per cent.

After ringing 50 of the numbers again a week later, he got through to two recruiters and only a further four (out of 48) returned his messages – again, less than 10 per cent.

As a career recruiter, proud of what we do, I find this result supremely depressing. We run expensive ads and invite people (customers in my view) to call us. Then we ignore them. It is disrespectful. It’s a sad indictment of the way recruiters are managed and coached. But it is also a supreme opportunity. An opportunity for forward thinking recruiters to differentiate and provide a level of service that leaves customers “wowed,” Frankly right now, it seems just returning a call might ‘wow’ most candidates replying to ads.

Talent is the only real currency a staffing company has. It’s what clients pay us for and it’s going to get increasingly difficult to access quality talent as the recovery takes hold. Job boards will become less effective and in any event they only tap into the active talent market. The recruitment company that owns the talent market.. will own the market

Candidates as customers? It’s a no brainer surely!

At Aquent we have a global strategy to improve the client and talent experience. We know we have much work to do. But we are tackling the task with gusto. We plan to stand out by hiring people with the right attitude, coaching customer service standards, measuring our customer satisfaction independently, and then rewarding staff according to what the customer thinks.

Posted in Employee engagement, Personal Branding, Recruitment, Recruitment Skills, customer service.

Tagged with Brand You, Customer loyalty, customer service, Employee engagement, Recruiter Training, Trusted Advisor.

3 comments

By Greg Savage – February 9, 2010

Customer service in Recruitment. We need to put our money where our mouth is

Read the websites of any ten random recruitment companies. From any country. In the ‘About Us’ or ‘Our Services’ section, you will almost certainly find glowing and poetic prose about ‘customer service’ and the ‘customer comes first’ and ‘exceptional standards of service delivery’ and many other cliche-ridden phrases. But these claims were not written without sincerity. The companies professing to provide flawless service intended that to be the case I am sure. The desire to be excellent is real in most cases.

It is the delivery on the service promise that is the problem. All companies, in all industries, find it challenging to consistently deliver top service across a broad customer base. Indeed, it takes a very special business to do that.

But recruitment is in a class of its own when it comes to over-promising and under-delivering.

Recruitment and staffing is a special case because we ask our recruiters to deliver on the customer experience, but then we reward them largely for the dollars they individually generate, regardless of how many candidates and clients they burn along the way. So there is a mismatch of message and of motivation.

At Aquent, one of our key global objectives is to demonstrate the best customer service and loyalty in the staffing industry worldwide. But that lofty goal can’t be measured by self-acclimation! It has to be empirical and unbiased. So we have engaged Inavero, a specialist customer-satisfaction survey firm – focussing in the staffing and professional service arena – to survey our customer base, in every one of our 70 offices, every six months

We have introduced a customer service charter across our business, set up local task-forces to drive response times for talent and clients, and now we survey what our customers think of us on a regular basis. And trust me when I tell you it’s a scary thing to do! People don’t hold back, and some individual remarks via the survey can sting! And in some cases, where we have let our customers down, it’s well deserved. But the key thing is that we are able to quickly move into service-recovery mode. Even more telling, we get an overall customer satisfaction score for each business unit, and we can track quarterly improvement and change.

And that is super cool! But we have gone one step further

From January 2010 all Aquent Agents (consultants) in the International business now have a big chunk of their compensation linked to improvements in these customer service scores. So at Aquent we compensate people with a fair base salary, and exceptional results attract meaningful bonuses, as is true of most of our industry. But now our recruiters can earn a 25% “kicker” on top of their bonus, if their Inavero customer score meets the set benchmark of improvement and excellence.

Of course Aquent is a commercial enterprise. Revenue and profit is our lifeblood. But so is brand and reputation and self-esteem of our own staff. And frankly, providing exceptional customer service is directly linked to commercial success anyway. Great recruitment firms will differentiate their offering in two distinct ways, I believe. Firstly, by specialisation and depth of knowledge, and secondly through exceptional customer service.

But talking about customer service can become a stream of so many cliches. Meaningless spin without substance and without any grunt behind it to actually drive better customer experience.

At Aquent we will not be duped by our own PR. We measure what the customers think. We cop what they tell us on the chin. We work out ways to fix the problems.

And then we reward our staff when the customers are happy

Posted in Management Skills, Recruitment, customer service.

Tagged with Client management, Customer loyalty, customer service, Employee engagement, Leadership, Managing Recruiters, Recruitment consultant compensation, Relationship building, Trusted Advisor.

7 comments

By Greg Savage – February 2, 2010

Integrity. It’s a bit like virginity. Either you have it…or you don’t!

I have been in business a long time. And all of that time has been in the rough and tumble world of recruitment and staffing. Having worked as a recruiter, manager, and owner of recruitment businesses all over the world, I have seen my share of dubious business practices. Indeed I have, sadly, been witness to many instances of outrageously deceitful and unethical behavior. We have all seen it no doubt.

In business, as in life generally, we expect to confront people who are dishonest. We know they are there, and we become better at identifying them before too much harm is done. But what really gets me is that category of person in business who preaches ethical behavior, even believes they are whiter than white, but when put to the mildest of tests, will collapse in a heap of moral compromise at best, and resort to outright duplicity at worst.

In a strange way I have even come to prefer dealing with crooks who knows they are crooks, rather then those people who believe there are degrees of honesty. People who somehow feel you can leverage acting decently against the amount of money involved. You cannot. Honesty is like being a virgin. You are, or you are not. You can’t be a virgin when it suits you.

I remember a conversation with a manager a long time ago that sticks with me as an example. I had recently taken over a business, and inherited some of the middle-management. The situation was that we had billed a client a large fee. The placement was made in Asia and the fee was in Singapore dollars. The client, based in the US, paid the invoice with US dollars, a value that was almost double the original, correct amount. I asked the manager of the office handling the deal “what do you propose to do”? The reply was along the lines of, ”well normally I would tell the client about the error, but this is a large fee and we are having a poor month in my office, so I feel we should let it slide”. Of course I quickly smothered that idea, but I knew I had a serious problem. What is the mindset of a person who will effectively steal from our clients? What is the moral fortitude of someone who will compromise any standard of honesty “because they are having a poor month”.

In 2009 I saw so many examples of this “rubber-band morality”. Clients, candidates and others closer to home, have managed to surprise even me with how tenuous is their grasp of what is right, and what is wrong. Yes, times are tough and money is tight. But what we have to understand is that it’s in exactly these circumstances that honesty and moral strength counts. Anyone can be ‘ethical’ if there is no temptation to test your ethical fibre. It’s very easy to see yourself as ‘honest’ if there is nothing financial at stake to give you pause for thought.

I love the competitive nature of the recruitment business. Anyone I have worked with or against will attest that I ask nor give any quarter in the commercial battle. Winning is important. Success is what we strive for.

But not at any cost.

To me its obvious that in business, or indeed any commercial interaction, you play it as hard as you can, but stick by the rules, retain your humanity and ensure that you will always be able to look every person you deal with in the eye.

Don’t be like a client who said to me once, as he lied his way out of paying a bill , “Greg, I am an honest man, but business is business”

Sad and pathetic

Posted in Ethics, Leadership, Personal Branding, Recruitment.

Tagged with Brand You, Ethics, Leadership, Relationship building, Trusted Advisor.

7 comments

By Greg Savage – January 4, 2010

Employee engagement. Not child’s play, but we can learn from our kids

In the world of managing staffing companies, I imagine the last 12 months are up there amongst the hardest ever. For us at Aquent, despite our market leading position, we have had to respond to declining demand with staff reductions, reduced hours and a range of spending cuts. Good commercial sense of course, and our business is in prime shape because of it, but it pays not to underestimate the human toll.

I have been travelling a lot around the business lately and it’s obvious our people are bruised by a very challenging year. Faith in the company remains rock solid I am pleased to say, but no employer should take staff engagement for granted, and this will never be so true as the market recovers and people consider their options.

Of course I was well aware of the challenge of morale, engagement and staff retention right through the downturn, but a little scenario has been playing out even closer to home than Aquent, that has driven this lesson home to me recently.

I have a 19-year-old daughter, just completing second year of a Bachelor of Business in Marketing at University in Sydney. (I will call her ‘M‘ here because mentioning her name on my blog will provoke World War 3 at home). Being a true child of her generation, ‘M’ can’t envisage life without a car, massive mobile phone bills, and a not inconsiderable social life. Equally, I can’t imagine a world where I pay for these trappings of her good life.

So ‘M’ has a job. And it’s a good job too – on the surface. For reasons soon to become clear, I won’t mention her employers’ name, but she has a retail role in one of the flagship outlets. It’s well paid too, and with Sunday overtime, it keeps her in the style she feels she deserves, while enabling her to complete university as well.

Having a father in the recruitment industry is a double edged sword for ‘M’ however, because I encouraged her (vigorously) to also look for experience in a field closer to her career goal. And to her credit she secured “work experience” with Pulse Communications, a successful PR company, which is part of the STW Communications Group in Sydney. This arrangement is like an internship and she has worked every Friday at Pulse for the last three months. Great experience, but unpaid.

Now this is where it gets interesting. ‘M’ detests her well paid ‘real’ job. People are cold and disinterested. They operate in cliques that exclude newcomers. Her boss doesn’t work the days she does, so she has never met her! On one occasion the supervisor left at 4 pm and all five of the other employees working on the same shift as ‘M’, moved out back into the staff room and stayed there until closing time. The fact they had left a trainee to handle a long line of irate customers, while they smoked and joked, apparently caused them no concern at all. The culture is such that when she arrives for work a cheerful “good morning” is met with stony silence more often than not. When she leaves maybe one person out of five will say goodbye. The tiniest error is met with derision and scolding. I was saddened to have her tell me she goes to work with “a heavy feeling of dread in her stomach”.

But Pulse is so different. As I warned her she would, she stacks boxes and stuffs envelopes, but they have also give her interesting research and include her in client meetings as an observer. On her second day she was invited to lunch with the team celebrating a big win. People know her name, include her in all goings on, and the CEO asks her how things are going. She loves going there, and has learned so much she has been totally re-enthused about a career in communications.

I was stunned and delighted be told by ‘M’ that during her (obscenely long) Uni vacation, she has volunteered to work at Pulse three days a week. And she is not paid one cent.

So what do we learn from this? ‘M’ hates her paid job and only turns up for the money. She does her best, but no doubt her unhappiness must show in her customer service – or at least it will eventually. She is looking for a new job and will leave as soon as she can. But Pulse, where she is not even paid, brings a sparkle to her eye. She looks forward to going there. She speaks in awe of the people who work there, and has taken a renewed interest in her university studies as a result.

And so I reflected on this lesson. I am not expecting anyone at Aquent to volunteer for three days unpaid work a week any time soon (!) But the importance of creating a culture and an environment where people want to be is clearer than ever. Commercial success is important, but so is belief in the business and a return on our efforts that are to measured in fun and self-respect as well as dollars

I will be working with the senior Aquent management team to create just such a work place at Aquent.

Posted in Employee engagement, Leadership, Management Skills.

Tagged with Employee engagement, Leadership.

4 comments

By Greg Savage – December 14, 2009

What future for recruiting? (Guest blog from Bill Boorman)

For a while now I’ve been changing my views on the future of recruiting. I have a feeling that the market is going to look quite different once we have shaken off the shackles of recession. I didn’t always think this way, but over the last year I have been building a fantastic network via social media channels. My network consists of an eclectic mix of HR professionals, Recruiters, Vendors, technologists and others that live around the talent area globally. This combined input which has come via twitter, my 3 radio shows on blog talk radio, various blogs, linked in, latterly the wave and other channels have led me to these conclusions. This is how I see recruiting evolving over the next 3 years in a nutshell.

1: Corporate companies that have looked to cut cost during tough times will continue to do so in the boom times. I see this taking over much of the generalist market with HR teams taking on much of the lower end recruiting and traditional recruiters retreating further in to specialist niches where they can show real expertise.

2: The upshot of this will be more generalist recruiters opting for a very low cost option based on the job boards. The latest figures out of Australia demonstrate that the post and pray method still dominates the sector. This was very much the standard delivery model during the boom year’s post 94, where speed was valued ahead of quality of service to either the candidates or the clients. I don’t blame recruiters for this; both the clients and candidates drove the market this way by creating intense competition for limited resource. Post recession, the corporate recruiters have wised up to this and realised that they might as well do this themselves at a greatly reduced cost. Those recruiters that are unable or unwilling to change what they have always done have increasingly resorted to low fee or flat fee charging relying on volume. I believe this model combined with direct recruiting will dominate this end of the market.

3: Recruiters will continue to find new ways of offering the same service. Packaged and priced differently. An over populated market means more need to change their offering to differentiate. Over the last months I’ve seen models that pay large bounties for referrals from the network, that charge a fee based on time spent regardless of result or volume of recruiting, recruiters who have switched to providing a managed consultancy service charging for outputs in work over hourly charges and even Aquent have moved to a purely exclusive or retained basis, changing the way they interact with clients in the process. I applaud this creativity but equally believe it will change the recruiting landscape. Essentially the job we do will be the same, but we will package it very differently.

4: Recruiters will continue not to get social media. Despite the outraged posturing of the many bloggers and commentators this is actually o.k. I say this because the majority of the global population are much the same. Forget the stats you see, if you conduct a poll on LinkedIn asking how many recruiters have recruited via LinkedIn, unsurprisingly the results look favourably on the channel from where the opinion was elicited. Rather controversially I also believe that those recruiters that don’t get it won’t disappear. Personally I’m rather glad not many do, because it leaves the field open and unpolluted for those of us that understand the best way to network. The volume of recruiters that do nothing in LinkedIn groups other than posting jobs demonstrates the risk of damage to recruiter’s reputation as a whole by not contributing.

5: Relationships between clients and candidates will become the currency of the market. Increasingly, wise recruiters will return to managing fewer candidates that they understand properly (as a result of interview over registration) will change the way candidates choose who they want to represent them. Candidates in skill short markets will know they hold the balance of power and will be looking for real partners in their job search over those that do little for them. Equally, clients will choose to work with fewer recruiters and will expect regular contact, feedback and help. They will also look to their suppliers to be subject experts that can advise and help rather than purely process.

These are my thoughts for the coming year. I’d love to hear if you disagree! Be ambassadors for the business!

Twitter: @BillBoorman

Blog: http://recruitingunblog.wordpress.com/

Website: http://www.billboorman.co.uk

Email: bill@billboorman.co.uk

Posted in Recruitment.

6 comments

By Greg Savage – December 8, 2009

Yes Twitter and Face Book are cool…but recruiters, get real!

This year, in my capacity of International CEO of Aquent, (the only global staffing company dedicated to marketing and design) I was very excited to help launch our new website, which specifically promotes the ability of our talent and clients to connect with our Agents, via social networks, if preferred.

You might think then, that I am a social networking evangalist, a true believer that is convinced “old recruiting” is dead and a new world of connecting via web-enabled networks awaits. A world where recruiters will manage armies of “friends and contacts” and slot them neatly into web-generated clients, themselves sourced via a gigantic pool of “Linked-In” connections.

Well, you would be wrong on both counts. No, I am not a social networking fanatic, and nor do I believe a new recruiting world will unfold, based on social networking per se.

Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware of the potential power of social media. I have my “Linked-In” page, and I find it fantastic for information and idea sharing and locating lost colleagues and also accessing talent. I am “Face-booked ” up to the max, although in truth its primarily a way to see what my daughter is up to, and share photos with my sisters overseas. And I fully “get” how Twitter, and the rest, are going to revolutionise how we communicate with people on a broad scale. We are in a dynamic, fast-changing world, and technology is impacting many aspects of human interaction — no doubt.

But remember this! Faxes were going to revolutionise recruitment. Remember? The Internet was going to wipe traditional recruiters from the landscape. Have we forgotten already? Email was going to mean the end of consultative recruiters. Web-testing and screening would mean selling skills and closing skills and candidate management skills were going to be redundant for poor old recruiters like me, living in yesteryear.

And none of it came true. None of it.

Sure we are in a recession now and recruitment as an industry is suffering, but that’s pure economic cycles. The truth is that for the five years up to 2008, the staffing industry was growing like it never had before. Record revenues, record profits, record take-up of our services by both clients and candidates, right across the world.

The Internet and email and job boards didn’t kill off recruiters! New technologies helped them to new heights and new riches! And the truth is that the recruiters who are doing the best now are those who are able to integrate the traditionally required skills with new technologies, and make one plus one equal three.

As I commented in our press release announcing our new website “’Job boards don’t find people jobs. People finds people jobs!”

(See the full release here )

Just before the market tanked about 18 months ago, an exiting employee of my firm, commented “Aquent is great place and Greg a good enough guy, just too old-fashioned”. Apparently most of that opinion was based on my refusal to pander to spoilt Generation Y’ers in our business who wanted everything, gave little in return, and had tantrums along the way to boot. The departing employee who made that remark was going to a new staffing world of in-house café lattes, flexible work hours, torn-jeans dress code — and a talent management strategy based entirely on scanning Facebook all day.

Sadly that business is gone, along with many of its ilk. And of course it’s the “old fashioned” recruiters, people who actually look to connect, personally, with talent and clients, recruiters who consult and add value, staffing professionals who can read between the lines, influence, persuade and truly match beyond a bland job description — who will survive this downturn and thrive in the inevitable upswing.

Social networking is a communications channel recruiters must embrace. No question. But lets be smart about this. It’s NOT the Holy Grail. It’s just a tool. An enabler, and it needs to be harnessed like all the other mechanisms we use to manage our relationships with clients and candidates.

Social networking devotees talk lovingly of “friends” and “contacts,” when in most cases, they are nothing of the sort. Who are we fooling when we call someone we have never met (quite possibly never heard of), “a friend”. Clicking “I accept” does not buy you love baby! How strong are your “friendships” when your “friend” can rid themselves of you by clicking a mouse (and hey, you don’t even get notified your “friendship” has bitten the dust). And your “contacts and connections” on Linked-In can be kept real if you are vigilant and disciplined, and there is huge value there. But accept everyone who wants to connect to you, and you build someone else’s mailing list, little more.

Every day web-advertising spruikers spout scare tactics suggesting recruitment companies who don’t pour money into social networking recruiting will be left behind, and be unable to attract talent. Total nonsense of course.

The real value of social media for the recruitment industry is building communities of like-minded people. Communities where you can showcase your credibility and build up networks that will allow you to source in the future. In fact I think the real value of social media is as an “influencer’,'more than a way to tap into talent . Those recruiters who use social media as a de facto job board, listing endless links to job descriptions juts don’t get the main game at play

Eventually a more structured and fruitful way to mine networking sites will be developed, and then it will behoove recruiters to get serious. But by then the social networking phenomena itself would have evolved into something different!

In the meantime, posting a job vacancy via a Tweet is even less targeted than the least targeted job board. You may get a valid response, you may not. But the fact remains, the real work of a skilled recruiter happens once the talent has applied, not before.

Social networking “gurus” and evangelists pontificate about how its web 2.0 that will make or break the next generation of recruiters, when in most cases these experts have never placed a person in a job and would have zero idea of the dynamic that has to occur for placements to be consistently made.

And that’s what we are talking about here, fellow recruiters. Don’t be seduced by the bright lights! Don’t be hooked into the promise of untold riches based on browsing your Facebook page. Sure, use Twitter, but don’t be a Twit. Play around with Facebook but face up to the reality that the hard work of building an offline reputation and real-world skills is still required. Link-In for all you are worth, but don’t allow the missing link of people interactions skills to be your downfall.

Of course, candidates and even clients, will originate from your social networking activities. I have had success that way myself. And that’s cool and its very welcome. But I also pick up candidates and clients from amongst the parents on the sidelines of my sons rugby matches! No one is really suggesting that as a targeted, sustainable way to re-invent recruiting are they?

Here is the nuts of it. The hard work of developing a sustainable relationship, building trust, proving you can add value, must be done in the “old fashioned” way. The way that has kept me in the staffing industry for thirty years, making money and having fun during every single one of them!

So as Aquent enters a brave new world of a totally transparent website which connects our customers to our people, note that social networking is intrinsic to our plan, but note too that the real theme behind our website is kinda “old fashioned”.

Connecting people and building real relationships.

Because its people who find people jobs.

Posted in Recruitment, Social Networking, Technology.

Tagged with Consultative selling, Recruitment Consulting Skills, Social Networking.

9 comments

By Greg Savage – December 7, 2009