idealpeople blog

We were interested to see the winners of Jobsite’s RecruitRank award named this week. Hearty congratulations to the winners (a list of whom can be found here), for what it’s worth.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that we’ve blogged about RecruitRank before, although we didn’t mention Jobsite nor the awards themselves by name.

However, now that there is some PR happening around the system, we’ll drop the cloak and dagger approach and just come out and be critical.

*Takes deep breath*: Jobsite are letting their customers down badly with these “awards”. There, we said it.

Let’s briefly explain the system. Jobsite (www.jobsite.co.uk) is one of the major on-line recruitment sites. RecruitRank (www.recruitrank.co.uk) is a system which allows anyone who applies for a job through Jobsite to “rate the agency” responsible for that advertisement. Applicants can rate the agency they apply to in four areas: Communication, Industry Knowledge, Understanding and Overall. Each candidate can score an agent they apply to out of five in all of these areas. In principle, a half-decent idea, and a way to start encouraging better lines of communication and better recruitment practice.

The reality though is much much different. There are so many flaws with this system. Let’s look at some:

1 Everyone can vote
Any applicant can rate an agency’s service. We’re the first to admit that we don’t have the time to reply to every applicant with a detailed reason for not selecting them for a particular job. We would love to, as would most recruiters, but we don’t have the time. That said, we’re not surprised when we receive a score of 1 for Communication from a candidate who never heard from us.

However, pretty much all the feedback we get from applicants who score us “1″ for communication, also score us 1 for Market Knowledge, 1 for Understanding and 1 Overall. But how do they know? They never heard from us, remember? So someone who never experienced our industry knowledge or our “understanding” (although we’re not sure what this refers to) is able to rate us against these criteria?

2 So, so easy to fix
The system is, of course, so open to abuse it’s unbelievable. We could, if we really, really wanted to, create some fake jobseeker profiles (costs nothing), apply to loads of our jobs, and then score ourselves 5 for everything. We would shoot up the league table.

When the system was launched, we knew that it would get messy. We could see the flaws, but we weren’t too worried. However, check out what you get for winning one of their awards (which are won by being at the top of the league for the longest time, we think). In addition to a “stylish” RecruitRank tophy. (OK, so we’re not too fussed that we haven’t got one of these), winners get:

- The exclusive use of the finalist or winner RecruitRank Award logo for one year which can be displayed on [your] website and marketing materials.
- Coverage in relevant trade and regional media after the Awards ceremony
- Full details of their win on www.recruitrank.co.uk and links to their site.
- Number one or top ten star logos featured on their vacancies, posted on Jobsite, with full details of their achievements.
- Banners on the Jobsite homepage and recruiter login page linking to information on them.
- PR support with releases to local and trade media on their success.
- Emails to candidates and fellow recruiters linking to information on them.
- Coverage in ‘Worklife’, our monthly candidate newsletter which goes out to over 450,000 candidates.
- Links in our daily Jobs-by-Email alerts to candidates

Now let’s get this straight. We pay the same price as the rest of Jobsite’s customers. Jobsite implement an inherently unfair rating system, and give a generuous bounty to those who win, despite the fact that the system is clearly wide open to abuse. They tell their candidates that some of the agencies who pay for their service are better than others. They fund PR initiatives which essentially say “some of our customers are better than others”.

We could do something similar. Every time a candidate of ours goes for an interview, with one of our cusomters, we could ask them to give some feedback on how the experience was. How did they treat you? Did they make you a cup of tea? Did they make it nice and cosy for you? Did they ask you nasty questions?

Then, we could give out some awards based on the responses. We could let the winners use special logos on their website saying “excpetional hirer” or something similar. We could offer free publicity to a select few clients, based on interview feedback. But of course we wouldn’t do that, because our customers are our customers and they’re all different. We’d also hazard a guess that we’d get positive feedback from people who got a job, and negative feedback from people who didn’t.

We sincerely hope that this idea doesn’t spread throughout the industry, or that if it does, it’s based on much more tangible and sensible feedback. We’re all for evangelising Recruitment best practice but this really isn’t the way to about it.