As 2019 draws to a close, the team at RECRUITERS is celebrating its best performance ever. Our performance is, and always will be, driven by our vision that everyone should feel inspired in work, secure when they’re there and leave fulfilled every day. Our purpose is to see this vision become a reality for the clients, candidates and colleagues we work with.
As Ireland’s most trusted recruitment partner, RECRUITERS is rated 4.9/5 on both Trustpilot and Google Reviews, with more than 200 reviews on Trustpilot and more than 100 Google Reviews. We’re the only agency in Ireland that includes Trustpilot, which is the world’s largest independent review site. Opening the ability to leave online reviews on our site came at a risk, but we wanted to do it to increase transparency within the industry and we were confident in our services that this would pay off.
From the very start of the year, we looked for ways to improve our service offering by conducting a new in-depth customer experience survey with 100 of clients in January. Our aim is to deliver customer experience excellence for new and existing clients which in turn will distinguish us from competitors, create greater service value and encourage repeat and new business. There are six pillars to our excellent customer service: a personalised service, meeting and exceeding expectations, showing clients genuine empathy, building trust, minimising our clients’ time and effort, and resolving to turn any poor experience into an amazing one. While our satisfaction rating in our customer experience survey was more than 95%, we were able to take feedback and from the survey and stich it into our processes throughout the rest of the year.
Additionally, more than 20% of our placements were made from referrals in 2019. This is because we take pride in the personal service we offer candidates because we take the time to get to know them and their career aspirations.
2019 was also a big year for who we worked with. We became the exclusive recruitment partner for Diplomat.ie, a news site for diplomats, ambassadors, councillors and embassies in Ireland.
We collaborated with Trinity College Dublin on a new postgraduate course in innovation and enterprise development at Tangent, Trinity’s Ideas Workspace.
Our contracting team also partnered with TalentNet to bring our contractors and clients a better customer experience.
This year, RECRUITERS also shared the team's expert knowledge to a wider audience by writing guest posts for IrishJobs.ie, HubSpot, Image.ie and gradireland. Looking to 2020, our client services director Brian McFadden also spoke about salary and industry predictions for the year ahead in the Irish Independent.
RECRUITERS is a multi-award-winning recruitment agency and those wins continued in 2019.
European awards
We were first named as ‘One to Watch’ in Europe in a list of business excellence published by the European Business Awards, one of world’s largest and longest running business competitions. We then went on to become a national winner in the Business of the Year category.
Irish awards
In November, RECRUITERS was shortlisted for numerous National Recruitment Federation Industry Awards including:
Best in Specialism for our contracting services
Medium Agency of the Year
Best Agency Online
Unsung Hero
Best in Sales & Marketing
Permanent Recruitment Consultant of the Year
However, our true reason to celebrate that night was our contracting division manager Sarah Pope, who took home the top prize for Contracting Recruitment Consultant of the Year.
As part of our CSR strategy this year, RECRUITERS has partnered very closely with GOAL with the belief that sharing our knowledge can help them improve their employer branding strategy and recruit talent who in turn will help others suffering from hunger, homelessness and poverty following conflict or natural disaster. Our managing director Gerard Doyle has joined GOAL’s People & Advisory Board and travelled to Uganda to deliver interview training to 30 managers.
Our head of marketing, Andrew Sheehan, also assisted GOAL with its 2020 employer branding strategy by delivering an employer branding assessment that identified its existing strengths and weaknesses, a workshop that unearthed its architype, meaning and messaging and a recommendations report for GOAL to drive its employer brand strategy, communication, alignment and execution.
In 2019, the RECRUITERS team also grew by 20%, adding new recruitment consultants to our contracting division, sales and marketing division, technology division and accounting and finance division. We also added a growth editor to the marketing function, who is responding to the market’s demand for high-quality content.
This year, we are also celebrating five-year anniversaries with four of our people, all of whom have stayed with RECRUITERS because of our values and because we recognise and reward good work. We also have a great social club, which did stellar work throughout the year to keep us entertained, including our Halloween party pictured below. Learn more about what it’s like to work at RECRUITERS here.
Last year, RECRUITERS introduced Project Revive, a HR initiative that allows all staff that have been with the company for five years to avail of two months’ paid leave to travel the world or just relax and revive with family and friends. This year, our resident marketing recruitment expert Louise O’Reilly was the first to use the initiative to go travelling.
Training & development is key for us and this year, we have developed an e-learning platform so new consultants can run through all of their induction at their pace and not have to wait for trainers to become available. In 2019, RECRUITERS also launched a staff discount programme in partnership with Wrkit, giving our employees access to hundreds of retail discounts and free online courses to help them upskill and cross-skill.
Our contracting community continued to grow in 2019 because of our contracting care model, which has also caught the eye of three large multinational businesses that we now work closely with in supplying Ireland’s best contracters. And of course, who can forget our world-famous annual contractor BBQ, which was bigger and better than ever in 2019.
On our website, we’ve seen a 91% increase in direct traffic with increases across all channels, which has led to a 60% increase in website job applications and our users have almost doubled. We've also seen a 60% increase in Instagram followers, a 31% increase in Facebook followers, a 23% increase in Twitter followers and a 24% increase in LinkedIn followers. The number of CVs registered with us also increased by 69% and those who signed up to our job alerts increased by 172%.
In growing the marketing function and hiring a content editor this year, RECRUITERS produced informed content from within our industry, not just to help candidates, but to provide key insights to employers, inform them on how content can help solve their challenges and become a thought leader within the recruitment industry. To that end, we’ve added almost 100 new articles to our blog to help candidates and businesses all over Ireland. We also created a new weekly email directly to business leaders to help them with all their hiring needs and keep them abreast of the latest trends in attracting and selecting Ireland’s very best talent.
As part of our commitment to help our clients with their hiring challenges, we also produced an employer branding video for AA Ireland to help them showcase what it’s like to work there.
In the final quarter of the year, we produced our 2020 Salary Predictions Guide, which aimed to answer questions from employers and employees alike about what to expect in 2020, how Brexit will affect their business and what kind of salary increase they could expect depending on their industry.
We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to all of the staff, businesses, jobseekers, partners and collaborators for all of their continued support in 2019. We really look forward to working with you all in 2020 and beyond! 2019 has been a record-breaking year for RECRUITERS but none of it would have been possible without you all.
Want us to help you find the best talent in 2020? Check out our hiring solutions here.
Hoping to land your dream job in the new year? Simply register your CV with us and/or create job alerts tailored to your specific career preferences. Sit back, and let us do the hard work on your behalf.
