In his recent blog post Teamwork at Wahl+Case my colleague Anju broke down our team structure and how we operate. He also mentioned our “one company rule”

“Always do what is in the best interest of your clients and candidates. Always.”

However, it’s pretty easy to put something on your website and not have to back it up with anything meaningful. To be fair, it’s not exactly a new phenomenon, so it’s pretty reasonable to approach these kinds of claims with a fair amount of healthy skepticism until you see some data.

NPS and the recruitment industry

If you aren’t familiar with NPS (Net Promoter Score), you can get a crash course here. Let’s start with some benchmarks. The average NPS for recruitment agencies in 2020 was 28, with Promoters at 38%, Passives at 52%, and Detractors at 10%. That’s a huge improvement compared to 2019, where the average NPS across search firms was -2.

That’s pretty… meh. According to the benchmarking data recruiters are usually closer to “needs improvement” than “great”.

So how does Wahl+Case stack up?

Given that 70+ NPS is considered world class service, I’d say we stack up pretty well.

Clients

On the client side we received a promoter rating (9 or 10) from 74% of responders and 23% passive (7 or 8). On the other hand, only 2% of clients rated our service as 6 or below.

Candidates

For candidates, it’s a similar story with 77% promoters, 18% passive, and 5% detractors. Needless to say, we are proud of these numbers and do our best to improve them year on year.

Historical Comparison

We first started measuring NPS back in 2015, and we’ve seen the numbers steadily increase, particularly on the client side.

Client

Our client NPS has shown the most improvement with promoters increasing from 60% to 74% and detractors lowering from 12% to 2%.

Candidate

In regards to candidates, we have seen a slight bump, with promoters sliding up to 77% from 74%, but we also increased in detractors going from 4% to 5%.

It’s not magic, but it’s not easy either

There are three areas where I think we have significantly improved over the past few years.

First, we value true partnerships with all of our customers. Partnership means an equitable and transparent exchange of information and time, which sounds easy enough but is incredibly difficult to actually achieve. Too many clients and candidates are used to below average service and approach recruiters as, at best, a vendor, and at worst, a necessary evil that merits as little time as possible. Convincing a business to partner with you on a search is an altogether different level of commitment, but one we strive to.

Second, that partnership has to be built and maintained over time. For candidates it’s easy to become cynical when your recruiter finds you a job and then promptly moves on to the next commission. It’s one reason why we don’t work on commission at Wahl+Case, to encourage a more thoughtful approach to relationship building.

I was once asked this question by a client: “After you place someone with us, how long do you wait before you pull them out and try to place them somewhere else?”

The question blew me away. My response “Never”, blew her away. I told her my hope is that they were super happy and stayed with the company as long as it was mutually beneficial for them to do so. And I hoped they got promoted and hired a bunch more people from us.

Finally, we ask what we can do better. For every response of 6 or less to an NPS survey, either myself or Bryan, Director for our engineering teams, will follow up immediately for more detailed feedback. In many cases, we’re able to turn a detractor into a promoter by understanding their dissatisfaction and addressing it through real action.

Still, there is a lot we can do better. The recruitment industry has done us a favor by setting a pretty low bar, and candidates and clients alike have every reason to expect more. So keep the feedback coming, we’re listening.

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