Professional Recruitment Consultants worth their salt go through rigorous Candidate preparation throughout any placement process. This includes advising the Candidate on interview techniques, coaching on environment specifics, and how to handle ‘the counter-offer’. The counter-offer can see deals worth thousands of pounds fall through in an instant and ultimately there’s little that can be done after a Candidate’s mind is made up.
External factors in Recruitment will regularly work against you and seeds of doubt, once planted, can sprout into insurmountable objections. And while you have absolutely no control over the relationship between a Candidate and their current employers, everything the Client sees and hears about and from a Candidate has to be your responsibility. Which begs the question; have you Google’d your Candidate lately? Your Client? Have you Google’d yourselves? As it turns out, the internet can end up costing you money too. And we don’t just mean your line rental.
For example:
a/ Public Indescretion
A Financial Controller is, after a long and gruelling recruitment process, offered a job. Great. They then proceed to hand in their notice with their current employer, only to find out at the last minute their prospective new employer has rescinds their offer due to an indiscretion from a drunken night out posted on a public Facebook wall. Game over.
b/ Misinformation
Misinformation about the Client is posted on-line from disgruntled ex-employees or poor quality competitors with similar business model. This impacts on a ‘Volume Recruiter’ as negative content reduces recruitment retention by 40%. Often malicious fiction and hearsay becomes accepted as the truth in the eyes of potential applicants. Upon discovery of this misinformation, proposed placements fall through as Candidate interest/confidence is lost.
c/ Review Sites
Having ignored the power that review sites have on perception, the internet displays predominantly negative content/comments about a Recruiter/Recruitment Agency. As with most companies, they don’t promote the positive reviews and stories from the majority of their satisfied customers; instead a few unhappy customers dominate the review sites. They focus on the negatives, from sales technique to problems with products and after-sales, and as a result Candidates and Clients go to your competitors in pursuit of a more reputable agency.
“Okay so I have an issue there are negative comments on-line?”
Try these simple steps:
- Where possible, talk to the person off-line or via private message and resolve the issue amicably.
- If the person has a genuine issue, don’t engage in conversation. Adding activity to the page will pushes the forum up higher the search engine rankings. If input is absolutely required, a short “Our company takes all complaints seriously and we will try to help where we can, so please contact us at [contact@company.com]” statement is the most you should contribute.
- Check the rules of the forum/review site that the person has posted to, many of the sites will remove posts that are threatening, defamatory or libellous.
- If still unsuccessful, don’t ignore the problem. It is easier to push down negative comments if they are recent; if the page is left for more than a few months like a stain they become harder to remove. And when left alone, they can gain a life of their own if others start to add their own comments.
Protecting your reputation:
Recruitment is about delivering results and Candidate & Client trust is a critical part of a successful placement. Investing in on-line branding is becoming more critical as many professions including Doctors, Lawyers and top sports figures are now more frequently targeted for negative attention.
If you have a distinctive name you are more at risk of being singled out on-line which can be both positive and negative. You don’t have to turn into a social networking addict, just produce a few well written social networking pages so people can find you on-line and make more balanced judgements about you or your business. Link this with an SEO campaign and it will be enough to protect your brand and be ready to deal with any unforeseeable circumstances.
