As one door closes… Another opens
It’s been an interesting week in my world. Just a couple of days ago we heard the result of a competitive trial against one of our major competitors. We face these frequently at hunt4staff.com and are reasonably relaxed when a client goes this route, knowing the work we have put in to make our service amongst the best in the industry.
When we heard our service was better than our competitor, we were pleased, although not that surprised. Nor were we surprised to hear our applicant tracking system was more sophisticated than our competitors product. So all in all something to be pleased with you’d think.
But no. We have handled a number of successful projects for this client and they have always been delighted with our service. Yet this week they chose to select our competitor based on their perceived brand. A brand which is largely built on the celebratory status of the dragon investor in that flat fee recruitment business.
Now I found this decision quite odd and rather disappointing. But you have to respect the decisions a client makes and move on. My challenge was how to sell the positive to my team who might be devastated to lose an account in such a way.
So this is how I explained it. If a business such as hunt4staff.com can achieve a service and product which is better than that delivered by a business with all the investment and resources a “dragon” can add then we have something to be rather pleased about. And if this one client rejected us on the basis of their brand alone, then there would be many more who would choose us simply based on the quality of service we have clearly established ourselves as excellent.
Now as a director you can seek to persuade your staff of the merits of such an argument, and they may even smile and try to agree with you. But you need a little more to make such a loss less painful.
Today, just two days later we did that. A major multinational organisation in exactly the same field has decided to place their recruitment business with us. An account which is probably ten times the size of the one we lost on Wednesday.
So as one door closes, another opens… It’s a funny old world.
About Jason Perry
I started my career within HR & Training, and became a qualified member of the CIPD and am now a Chartered Fellow of the Institute of Personnel & Development. In 1994 I started Assessment Systems – a business providing specialist consultancy in the area of Assessment Testing and Psychometrics. In 1999 we launched our second company, ASL Recruitment. We took the experience of providing assessment expertise and started trying to transform the high street recruitment market. In addition, we handled a number of senior and specialist roles. In 2009, we launched our new venture, Hunt4Staff.com delivering an online flat fee recruitment service for just £595. An active member of TEAM, The Employment Agents Movement, I sit on the National Executive of this organisation and am a Regional Director in the South East of England. I enjoy living in rural East Sussex with my wife and two daughters and take a far too enthusiastic, and perhaps even an interfering interest in politics.
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