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CLIENT STORY

Grovelands

The firm revolutionising recruitment by countering everything that gives the industry a bad name. They’ve got NPS scores reaching +87. How does Starred empower Grovelands to provide industry-leading Candidate Experience?
Industry
Recruitment

Candidates

697 placed last year

Use Case
Automated Candidate
& Client Experience Feedback
Integration
Bullhorn
Response rate
38% from Placed Candidates
Objectives & Challenges
  • Centralized feedback process
  • Respondent-friendly surveys
  • Integration with Bullhorn CRM to automate the feedback loop
Key Results
  • +87 NPS from placed candidates
  • Consultants benchmarked on cNPS
  • Candidate Experience feedback core to future strategy, results from Starred informing decision making.
Grovelands is a recruitment and consulting firm with a purpose: challenging the status quo in the industry.
They’ll tell you themselves – both consulting and recruitment have a terrible reputation for “money-grabbing attitudes, shady practices, and a total disregard for those they serve.” At Grovelands they’re out to change the model. They’re committed to being “unorthodox, pragmatic, real.”
At Starred we love Grovelands exactly because of this challenge to norms. They value long term relationship building over immediate revenue, because they understand it’s more sustainable and more profitable long term. It simply makes more sense to look after both candidates and clients with more care. As they write themselves in their corporate messaging: “Sure, money’s important. At Grovelands, we do pretty well for ourselves, and we’re proud of it. But here’s the thing: we know (and we’ve got the experience to prove it) that developing strong relationships with clients brings us more success in the long run.”
One of the fundamentals of Grovelands’ people-focused strategy is providing exceptional Candidate Experience. Let’s look at how Grovelands lives this in their practices, and how Starred empowers them to do so.

“Candidate Experience goes with our brand messaging and who we want everyone to know we are.”

Lydia Vasquez-Martin
Team Operations Coordinator @ Grovelands

Measuring Candidate Experience: why Grovelands chose Starred

Melanie Beatty – Marketing Manager at Grovelands – tells us that there was a growing need to centralize feedback. “It would come in from all kinds of places – email, word of mouth, anecdotally, social media.” In order to make informed decisions based on all their incoming feedback, the team began seeking out a solution which could do the job of being the central hub for feedback, as well as identify and prioritise action areas for improvement.

“Starred is really omnipresent in our organisation. Our leadership team are also fully onboard. Our CEO likes to check out the dashboards and analyze our feedback himself. It gives him confidence that everything’s going well and we’re working on the right things.”

Lydia Vasquez-Martin
Team Operations Coordinator @ Grovelands
So what does great Candidate Experience look like in practice? Once a candidate has been placed Grovelands will follow up with them and make sure they’re settling in okay, check if they’ve got any issues, and act as a mediator between the client and the candidate if any issues arise. They always ensure to provide candidates meaningful feedback if the client gives it, being honest and straight with them. They hold themselves to a high standard, contacting candidates within set timeframes and keeping to it. Melanie elaborates on giving candidates space to give feedback, for example that in a candidate meeting, “the candidate might want to answer your questions honestly but in that situation doesn’t feel comfortable doing so. But at an arm’s length they can reflect on the experience and tell us what was good, what can be improved – it’s great because this way our follow-up allows us to identify potential issues and prevent them from escalating.”

How do Grovelands’ candidates rate them?

The feedback data almost speaks for itself. Grovelands scores at +87 on NPS from placed candidates entering permanent contracts. Contract-based placements aren’t far behind at NPS +77. To give some context – in Starred’s 2018 Staffing industry benchmark – recruitment agency NPS at placement stage is +48. Grovelands should therefore be considered as Candidate Experience industry leaders.

New to cNPS in recruitment? We’ve got a guide for that.

How a full organisation lives and breathes feedback

Starred dashboards and Priority Matrix are like mission control for Grovelands’ candidate-centric ambitions, making action points clear and visible.

Lydia tells us that Starred addresses one of the central challenges Grovelands identified from the project outset – they didn’t want to give their consultants another tool to learn and add more admin. The Starred <> Bullhorn integration and automation would be taken care of in back office. Grovelands brought their consultants into Starred by showing them the added value of personalized dashboard and internal benchmarks. The team can compete against each other and themselves. “They always want to improve, it was so important for us that the solution provide direct accessibility to their personal feedback, from their candidates.”

A preview of the Starred feedback form Grovelands send to placed candidates. Interested in using Starred feedback forms?

Feedback is for the future: Starred is facilitating strategy

So what’s next for Grovelands? With truly excellent feedback rolling in for the front office, the team is now focusing on perfecting back office processes. They’re seeking to perfect things like welcome packs, payment schedules and other experience items on the client side – tracking how clients are taking care of Grovelands candidates.

This is important for Lydia, who again circles these action points back to candidate-centric strategy. “We just want to see that candidates are being taken care of as we would like.” Post-placement surveys on Starred are feeding Lydia the insights she needs to inform her briefings to account managers. “The people who are on your site are saying this about you and the role, they need these types of training and so on. We use this information to have extremely relevant conversations about our placed candidates. We want to know how we can help.”

As Grovelands continue to innovate and grow with a human-first philosophy in recruitment, here at Starred we’re excited to be part of the journey.

–With thanks to Lydia Vasquez-Martin and Melanie Beatty at Grovelands, and Nichola King – Customer Success Manager at Starred.

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