In a survey for global resourcing specialists, BPS World, has found that 30 percent of companies spend less than a day deciding on which recruitment partner to use every year and 14 percent will use whichever recruiter approaches them. Comment Simon Conington, Founder and MD of BPS World.

This despite the key role that good recruitment has to the success of a business. Only 8 percent of employers will take a month or longer to make the decision with 6 percent describing it as a constant consideration. 27 percent said they didn’t use recruiters. Simon Conington, Founder and MD of BPS World “I was very surprised at how little time many businesses give to choosing a recruitment partner. It highlights how, as an industry, we need to do more to differentiate ourselves.”

The survey set out to find out whether our behaviour as consumers was feeding into our professional lives. On this it found that 80 percent of people now use online reviews to make personal purchasing decisions with, slightly less, 71 percent of senior decision makers, saying they check online reviews before deciding on a supplier. 60 percent of decision makers said that they’d be prepared to pay 10 percent more for a supplier if they had good reviews.

Simon believes that recruiters should use this increasing reliance on reviews to achieve the differentiation needed by becoming transparent on the reviews they’ve received from clients; a policy BPS World have just introduced themselves. Simon concluded; “In the past it was difficult to find out much about a supplier unless you knew someone who had personal experience of them. In day to day life, people can now easily find what they need to make informed purchasing decisions, for example by checking out a travel company’s reputation online before they book a holiday. We want our clients to have access to that level of information by publishing all our reviews to help them make what we know is a business-critical decision.”