Delivering Top-Notch Service By Hire Dynamics CATEGORY: Blog POSTED: April 27, 2015 During our annual kick-off meeting this year, Clearly Rated CEO/Founder Eric Gregg joined us to present his thoughts on creating emotional connections with clients and candidates to build long-lasting relationships. His presentation titled, “Being the Best in Staffing,” focused on what remarkable service looks like and how certain staffing firm behaviors affect client and talent satisfaction. He should know. Eric’s company conducts an annual study with CareerBuilder that identifies the staffing industry’s satisfaction benchmarks, or Net Promoter Score® (NPS), and tracks the three metrics proven to have the biggest impact on long-term success: client and job candidate awareness, utilization and satisfaction. It reports on the gaps between the experience staffing firms say they provide and the experience clients and candidates say they actually receive. We review the findings from this study each year with the goal of identifying new ways for Hire Dynamics to enhance our services to our clients, talent and internal teams. Having Eric share his insight and feedback during our annual meeting was invaluable and much appreciated, and we would like to pass along three of the big takeaways: Staffing firms tend to overestimate their own persuasiveness. While 75 percent of responding clients think a “referral from a friend or colleague” is the most trusted resource for determining the quality of a potential staffing partner, a whole 94 percent of staffing firms believe the same. Also, only 23 percent of clients find a “firm’s sales rep or recruiter” to be a resource on quality, versus 91 percent of firms. Very few (13%) clients make a staffing partner choice based on price. What they want is for their staffing firms to educate, not just persuade. Among the staffing firm clients polled, here is what they identified as the top three attributes of a winning sales pitch: They knew more about my industry (29%) They shared information that helped improve our recruiting (26%) They shared current hiring trends (25% There are specific things we can do to improve satisfaction among our key stakeholders. Clients and job candidates both note “lack of responsiveness” among the three biggest mistakes staffing firms make in the field. Here are the others: For clients, many find staffing firms are also too pushy or aggressive (46%) and misrepresenting the people they are trying to place (42%). Key mistakes according to job candidates include “not being trustworthy or only looking out for their own interests” (31%) and “not searching enough to find me open positions” (20%). Overall, Eric shared that it’s a great time to be in staffing – the industry has added more jobs than any other sector since the recession, up 69.8 percent since July 2009. While business is booming, it’s still important to remain on top of our game. Clearly Rated’s detailed research helps us better understand our key stakeholder’s wants and needs. Do you have a program in place to analyze customer feedback? If not, how might it change the way you do business?
