“Why Didn’t We Have This Five Years Ago?” — How IT and Engineering Staffing Firm Blue Chip Talent Took Control of Their Recruiter-Candidate Relationships

Blue Chip Talent’s main passion is proactive recruiting. To them, that means focusing on relationships: between candidate and recruiters, between management and recruiters, and between recruiters themselves.

“We push heavily on building and maintaining relationships here,” said Tim Moilanen, Recruiting Operations Manager at Blue Chip Talent. “If we have great relationships with job seekers and our clients, we know that’s going to take us a lot further than any other avenue.”

When Moilanen was looking for a way to take control of their processes and incentivize recruiters, he looked to Great Recruiters. He knew founder Adam Conrad from Moilanen’s own recruiting days and sent him an email when he heard about Adam’s new staffing firm reputation management tool.

The results were remarkable: with a 45% return rate on candidate surveys, recruiters received real-time feedback that boosted morale, improved recruiter-candidate relationships and made Blue Chip Talent a happier place to work.

The issue: how could Blue Chip Talent close the feedback gap between recruiter and candidate?

Before Great Recruiters, Moilanen and staff felt lost in the sea of nameless reviews and infrequent feedback. They were asking for comments from candidates early in the process but found this direct solicitation didn’t encourage candidates to be open.

There was a stark disconnect between the recruiter process and the feedback that candidates were leaving on outside review sites.

Recruiters would get feedback from online review sites, but the comments were anonymous and without actionable items to improve the experience. And they were missing the good stuff — positive feedback that motivated their recruiters.

It was frustrating. Blue Chip Talent’s reviews were generally positive, but Moilanen wanted to dig deeper to identify how candidates really felt about the recruiting process.

When recruiters asked directly for feedback, they would often get happy responses, but no suggestions for improvement. On third-party sites, the reviews tended to be vague and anonymous. Moilanen wanted to make sure the feedback they were getting was useful so they could mediate unhappy candidates faster.

“If candidates have a good experience, they’ll tell one person,” said Moilanen. “If they have a bad experience, they’ll tell ten.”

The solution: open-ended consolidated feedback, collected in real-time

Enter Great Recruiters, which allowed for a simple feedback form to be dropped in as an open link in email signatures. The form and results integrated with their ATS to automate the review process, which meant no extra work was needed — recruiters followed their process, and Great Recruiters did the rest.

Moilanen was floored by how quickly this type of open form encouraged not only more frequent feedback but a flood of positive reviews, too. Recruiters quickly felt more connected to their candidates’ experiences, which made their relationships stronger.

Moilanen found that by asking candidates a few simple questions, his recruiters were more engaged in the process. The feedback form he used asked candidates:

• Did your recruiter call back in a timely manner?
• Do they seem experienced?
• Did they advise you to the best of their ability?
• Do you feel like they were honest and transparent?

The feedback rolled in immediately.

“This was exciting,” said Moilanen. “As recruiters, we often only hear feedback from people who’ve had negative experiences, so it’s great to receive that positive reinforcement when we’re doing well — and to see where we can improve.”

Since implementing Great Recruiters, Blue Chip Talent has received over 1,000 responses via the form, with up to 45% of candidates sending feedback.

And with an average rating of 4.65 out of 5, the encouraging feedback has motivated recruiters to step up their game.

Great Recruiters also uses gamification to add some friendly competition. Recruiters can sign into a dashboard to see how they compare to their fellow recruiters. At Blue Chip Talent, everyone finds the competition exciting.

“You can really see how you rank up compared to your peers, where you’re doing well, what you need to improve upon,” Moilanen said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about getting better.”

As the real-time reviews came in, recruiters found the feedback incentivized them to perform with strategies meant to develop strong relationships — responsiveness, transparency, and authenticity.

And knowing that the whole team would see the feedback was often enough to steer a recruiter in the right direction.“There’s nothing cooler than the real-time feedback. — just getting that feedback is all worth it,” said Moilanen.

The change has been so remarkable that Moilanen said he wished they’d had Great Recruiters when Blue Chip Talent started five years ago.

“In the end,” said Moilanen, “we use Great Recruiters to help recruiters do the right thing and enforce our values of relationships, relationships, relationships.”

About Blue Chip Talent
Blue Chip Talent is an IT, engineering, and financial staffing firm with a focus on relationships. An award-winning, woman-owned company, Blue Chip Talent has experienced significant growth since 2014 by recognizing that technology is moving rapidly and accelerating innovation across a range of industries. They also identify that the increasing need for exceptional talent acquisition is built upon customized, personable experiences for both candidate and client. Their client and employee relationships are the cornerstones of their success.