I am old enough to remember the days when the way you selected a restaurant to eat at you walked down the high street and read the menu in the window and casually checked how many people were sitting down inside. It was also possible that friends had given me the heads up on a new place or I had read an article in a prehistoric thing called a newspaper! Times have changed! A friend of mine recently returned from New York with her two teenagers and she was not able to enter any eating establishment, causal or otherwise, before a comprehensive check of the reviews online had been done. It seems that looking at the menu and through the window is simply not good enough. You need to check what other people have said and on a platform you can trust.
Restaurants, hotels and the hospitality sector in general have had the experience of having the public review their business online now for many years. At first there was a lot of kickback and trepidation about these platforms but today they form part of any hospitality business marketing plan. From a consumer point of view they are now almost ubiquitous. Imagine booking some accommodation without first taking a look at the reviews on Tripadvisor?
So it is that service based industries such as recruitment agencies are now going to have to embrace the opportunities and challenges that arise when your service is being reviewed and subsequently publicly available on a third party site. Frankly, as Group Managing Director of people2people, I am very much looking forward to this change in the marketplace as I see it as a much greater opportunity than a threat.
Although there are likely to be many platforms emerge in the coming year, at people2people we decided to partner with Talentwolf.co as our preferred platform for reviews. Of course we conduct our own feedback surveys and publish reviews on our own website, but as has been shown in other sectors consumers (candidates and clients in the case of the recruitment sector) will trust a third party over a corporate website every time.
Our decision to partner with Talentwolf.co was made because the platform was easy to navigate, was cost-effective and provided the additional benefit of being a way for our consultants to engage with talent they otherwise may not have been able to connect to. This feature above all others meant that Talentwolf.co was a standout against the competition. Talentwolf is not just about reviews, it’s a seach engine for talent to find the best recruiters in the market they are in. For the recruiter it’s a platform to showcase just how much better you are than your competition through great reviews examples of your thought leadership and even via video.
Going forward I will be keenly watching how Talentwolf grows and also what other opportunities are created for people2people by having our consultants participate on a platform such as Talentwolf.co
