If you’re on the lookout for a recruitment partner to either represent you for your next role, or to recruit the best talent for your team, here’s how to use the Net Promoter Score to help make your decision.
There was a time when recruitment was based on instinct and intuition. Gut feeling and emotional connection sometimes counted for as much as anything else, and an individual’s hunch could make all the difference to a candidate’s success.
Times have changed. Chemistry still matters, of course – the best recruiters still pride themselves on their ability to match an individual personality to a working environment. But advances in digital technology allow today’s professionals to test their judgements against all sorts of data.
And today, we’re seeing more and more that both proactive professionals searching for the right role, and savvy employers looking for the best talent, are increasingly aware of the metrics available to assess candidates, whether that’s numerical reasoning, emotional intelligence, or verbal communication appraisals. But as talent acquisition methods reach new levels of sophistication, it’s also worth understanding how businesses measure their own success, too.
At La Fosse, we focus all our efforts on providing an outstanding service for our clients and candidates. And so, we’re always working on how we can do what we do better. Because we’re a co-owned company, in which all of our employees have a share, we’re all motivated to keep the business improving every day – and a big part of that is carefully processing the feedback of our clients and our candidates.
So, here’s how (and why) we recommend using the NPS system when assessing your recruitment partner.
Keep positive for the best results
Checking out the favorability with which a recruiter is viewed by its customers seems an obvious first step for job-hunters and talent-seekers alike, but complex customer satisfaction survey results can be hard to find and even harder to interpret. That’s why so many companies have adopted Net Promoter Score, or NPS, which is based on one simple question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our service to a friend or colleague?”
Hundreds of organisations rely on NPS to gauge how good a job they’re doing – from Apple and Facebook, to Dell, to General Motors, to the NHS.
The brainchild of business strategy guru Fred Reichheld, NPS invites customers and consumers – in a recruiter’s case, that’s either its clients or its candidates – to give their provider a score between 0 and 10. If the service user gives a 9 or a 10, they’re a ‘promoter.’ If they award a 7 or an 8 they’re a ‘passive,’ and if they award 6 or lower, they’re a ‘detractor.’
An organisation’s overall NPS score is worked out by taking the percentage of users considered to be detractors away from the percentage of users who count as promoters. The lowest score possible is -100, where every user is a detractor, and the highest is +100, where everybody surveyed is a promoter.
Make the numbers work for you
In simple terms, the better the users rate a service, the higher the net promoter score a provider will enjoy – after all, it’s the users who best know how good (or bad) a service really is.
The beauty of NPS is that it gives you a single, easily comparable figure, with which to measure different service providers. A positive score reassures prospective clients that they can expect great value for money, while a negative score ought to have potential customers thinking twice.
At La Fosse, we measure our score on a 12-month rolling basis, and at present, our clients have given us an NPS score of +69, and the candidates we work with have given us +62. To put that into context, researchers at Inavero calculate that the average scores given to recruiters by their clients and candidates are +9 (clients) and +21 (candidates) respectively. Generally speaking, a score of 50+ represents exceptionally high levels of client or candidate satisfaction.
However, 50+ is no easy feat, at present Microsoft boasts a score of +41, and cloud-storage provider Dropbox has a score of +38.
There’s no single test for deciding which recruiter is the best fit for your business or career aspirations. Cost and convenience are important considerations – but so is confidence. Taking a look at the satisfaction and loyalty of a potential partner’s customers is as good a place to start as any. And don’t be afraid to ask what a business’s score is, they may not publish it online.
We’d love to speak with you about how we can help, please do get in touch.