Heather's Question on Satisfaction

Heather Hamilton from Microsoft (I encourage you to read her blog – it is both fun and informative) posted a great comment yesterday (check it out here). Here is a portion of the comment:

“Why aren't we treating our clients (hiring managers) like customers? From a marketing standpoint, companies just ask their customers if they are satisfied and then ask them why or why not to understand what they (the company) can do to impact change. If our clients are our customers, does it really matter how HR defines quality at all? I honestly don't think so. It's for us to understand, not define.”

Great question Heather. It all depends on if your buyer (the person who decides whether to use your service or outsource to external resource) is the same as your client (the people who use your service). If your client (customer) is the same person (people) who also make the final decision on whether to use your services then their satisfaction is the ultimate measure. However, for most internal staffing organizations, their fate actually is actually separated from whether their client is satisfied with their service or not. Their clients can love them and the CFO can still make the decision to outsource because of cost considerations. The buyer’s satisfaction is the number one priority, not the client's.

It sounds like your client group does make the ultimate decision whether to use your group or outsource to an outside service, so pursuing their overall satisfaction as your number one objective make perfect sense!

But here is the catch: “Client satisfaction" is a quality measure (quality of your service). I would also assume that you have a detailed understanding of what drives their satisfaction and that you measure your team’s effectiveness against those individual metrics. Each of those would in fact be quality measures. Remember, quality is simply measuring how you do versus an agreed upon or target specification. Quality is important because it lowers your cost and increases your revenue (or, in our case, our client’s satisfaction).

For instance, if you commit to your client group that you'll have 50 people in the pipeline next week and you achieve 60, you are providing a quality service. It is likely that your client group will want to keep working with you. So you are right: it is about their satisfaction. But their satisfaction is driven by the quality of your service.

Since most recruiters deliver “hires” as their product / service they need to determine a “goodness” measure (specification) for what they deliver. I advocate that the ultimate quality measure of a hire is whether the hire has a positive impact on the profit / revenue of the enterprise (thank you Dave for your wonderful post yesterday about this topic). But since that is hard to measure for many positions, we fall back to secondary measures of “hire quality” like whether they stick around (turnover), or whether their manager likes them.

Regarding this last measurement (whether the employee gets a positive review from their manager), my point has been that this is not a reliable measure of quality of hire because:

1. There is generally no connection between the original specification (job description) and the criteria against which the employee is being reviewed. So there is no casual connection between the job the recruiter does and the measurement of the employee’s success.

2. The employee review rarely definitely connects the employee’s performance with the increased (or decreased) value of the team’s contribution to the enterprises top and / or bottom line.

3. Therefore, the people who make decisions about whether to continue to use the internal employment department or outsource the whole shebang to an RPO do not see a strong connection between recruiter’s daily activities and the financial health of the organization.

4. So the “internal buyer” is usually not the hiring manager, and the internal buyer is not satisfied. That's why quality metrics have to start with what drives the business, not just whether their client is satisfied (unless, as is your case, they are one-in-the-same!)

Thanks again Heather for a great question!