As Recruitment Marketers, it’s our job to manage our company’s reputation as an employer. We’re tasked with communicating the employee experience to candidates in a positive and authentic way. All the while, our employees are telling our company’s story through their unfiltered employer reviews.
With social media, career networks and recruiting sites, so much of the storytelling power now lies with the reviewer — with past or current employees and candidates — rather than with the Recruitment Marketing team. Let’s face it: Employees are the true storytellers of our employer brand.
When putting together a plan to proactively manage your employer reputation, find out where employment in your company is being discussed publicly. One of the top places is Glassdoor. Employer reviews on Glassdoor are becoming more and more important to the candidate journey. According to the company, nearly 50 million unique users visit Glassdoor monthly.
So, how does the strategic Recruitment Marketer step in to shape candidate perception when so many people, with potentially competing viewpoints, are telling your employer brand’s story?
Here are 3 tips to manage your Glassdoor reputation:
1. Develop a plan to respond to reviews
One of the most effective ways you can manage candidate perceptions on Glassdoor is by participating in the discussion — and you don’t have to spend a dime to put this tip into play. Free employer accounts can respond to reviews.
It’s worth taking the time to do so. According to the 2016 Glassdoor U.S. Site Survey, 65% of candidates think of a company more favorably if they take the time to respond to reviews.
In a review response, you have the chance to explain your take on a reviewer’s feedback and what you might be doing internally to make changes. No organization is perfect, and candidates know it. Seeing that your organization is open to feedback and looking to make positive changes can really improve a candidate’s perspective of your org. Here’s a tactical plan to get started:
- Engage leadership: put together a presentation or resource that shows why responding to reviews and managing your Glassdoor profile is important, and get leadership buy-in. The Glassdoor for Employers Resource site provides some material that you can use.
- Determine who should respond to reviews: After leadership is on board, create a plan for who should respond. A best practice is that Talent Acquisition will respond to interview reviews, HR to general/anonymous reviews, and someone from leadership on a given team will respond to employee reviews that talk about a specific team experience.
- Arm the response team to act: once a response team is identified and engaged, they’ll need your guidance and assistance to be effective. Provide them with resources like best practices for responding to reviews and response examples. You may even need to show them how to use the Glassdoor Employer Center to submit responses. Something important to decide at this stage: whether responses need to be approved centrally before going live (and what the approval process looks like, if there is one).
Ready to dive deeper here? Glassdoor provides an on-demand webinar, “Everything You Need to Know About Glassdoor Reviews.”
2. Take advantage of the storytelling tools available to you
Proactively managing your company’s reputation means much more than just responding to reviews. It’s also your opportunity to communicate your employer brand story, and your Glassdoor profile provides great real estate to do so. If you have a free account you can update your company’s description, mission statement and number of employees. You can also add photos that showcase the employee experience.
If you have a paid Glassdoor account, you have access to more areas to share information and shape candidate perception. You can add multiple pages of content on topics you customize based on the talent you’re looking to reach. Further, for every market/country that you have a Glassdoor profile in, you can customize the brand content to that location and demographic.
A paid account also gives you the chance to publish 1,000 character company updates with a photo. These updates can be repurposed from stories going out on your other career channels.
Updates are emailed out to your company’s followers on Glassdoor. This email marketing boost can help you nurture and engage passive candidates. You could use this type of content marketing to keep your organization top of mind for periods of career change!
3. Empower your employees and candidates to share their stories
Once you’re actively responding to reviews and sharing your Recruitment Marketing content on Glassdoor, it’s time to add more authentic voices by encouraging your current employees and candidates to leave reviews.
While this may seem counterintuitive if you’ve been burned by a negative review, it’s actually one of the best approaches you can take to increase positive perception.
In my experience, 9 times out of 10 your rating from current employees is going to be much higher than your rating from past employees. The reason for this difference is simple: current employees are still with your organization for a reason! They will be more likely to share positive stories about their experience since they’re still invested in the organization.
How do you garner more reviews from this group?
There are different approaches you can take; but the most direct is often the most effective: just ask! Your communications need to be carefully considered though, so you’re not unduly trying to solicit positive reviews (a big no-no from a brand trust perspective and against Glassdoor rules).
Stumped on how to phrase your ask? There are templates built into the Glassdoor Employer Center under the “Request More Reviews” section. You can also upload mail lists and send out messages right from the Employer Center itself.
Which employees should you ask?
Employees who are new to the org are more likely to leave positive reviews about their experience, since they’ll still be in their honeymoon phase. It’s a great idea to operationalize asking for reviews at onboarding and at the end of their first 30 or 60 days with the organization.
Another strategy is to review the “Ratings by Location” page in the Analytics section of your Employer Center. From there, you can see which locations are most engaged and happy at work, based on past employee reviews. This might be a great group to engage with first, so that you can show early success before engaging other groups.
Other ways that you can ask for feedback is by adding a Glassdoor widget to your careers site, putting up posters around your office (old school, but it works!), and mentioning Glassdoor during Town Halls or other internal company events.
The key here though is to really listen. To maintain an authentic employer brand, your goal isn’t to just boost your ratings, because that won’t resonate or feel real. A central goal in asking for reviews is to read the pulse on how things are going. This way you can work towards building an internal feedback loop with HR that can improve the employee experience (and your brand!) over time. Win win.
The final takeaway? Proactive employer reputation management can help you hire better-fit candidates who will stay longer.
Responding to reviews might seem intimidating if you’re just getting started. But once you start, it can be a great asset for your Recruitment Marketing initiatives. Candidates researching employer reviews have done their homework about your company, can self-select whether your organization is a good fit and will be more likely to stick around if they already have realistic expectations coming in. If you manage your profile well , you can put review sites like Glassdoor to work for you to attract high-quality candidates.
