Updated July 2, 2022
What’s it like to work at this company from an employee’s perspective?
The answer to this simple question can make or break a candidate’s decision to work at your company, as 82% of candidates now consider employer brand and reputation before applying to a job — a 7% increase in the past five years.
This is why making an exerted effort to build and maintain a positive employer review reputation is more essential than ever to attract top talent to your workplace, especially in today’s competitive labor market.
The good news is that today’s employers are spoiled with options for employer review sites, which cater to every demographic, location, industry, geography and virtually every other characteristic you can think of.
While you don’t have to stress about up-keeping every single one, the more you familiarize yourself with possible options, and the more you can experiment and hone in the ones most relevant to your target talent audience, the more effective your reputation strategy will be.
With that said, here are 19 employer review sites to worth checking out!
19 employer review sites to put on your radar
Blind: Not officially a review site per se, but still worth paying attention to conversations on this mobile app. Blind provides anonymous users from the U.S. and South Korea with a platform to talk about their experiences working for different employers and industries. Once enough users sign up from a company, a channel opens up in the app where you can anonymously discuss your workplace with co-workers – which could offer some strong insight into how your employer brand is perceived internally.
Career Bliss: A site with millions of employee reviews that focus on areas like job satisfaction, employee happiness and salary to provide a “Bliss score.” They’re also a job board with 3.5 million listings. Career Bliss describes their top demographic as “influential experienced professionals,” between the ages of 35 to 54, making upwards of $100,000 per year. Career Bliss is composed completely of user-generated content – so you can buy ads here, but you can’t claim or make updates to a company profile.
Comparably: Founded in 2015, Comparably presents an ultra-detailed breakdown of culture and compensation info gathered from employee reviews. The site, which raised $7.5 million in venture capital in 2017, offers a slick user experience and more employer stats than any other review site we’ve seen. Comparably also sets themselves apart by letting employers get in touch directly with candidates who express interest through the platform.
Fairygodboss: A review site that spotlights women’s perspectives on their employers. They’re growing quickly – Fairygodboss reached 1 million unique visitors in January 2018. In addition to reviews, the site provides career information and advice, discussion boards and job listings. Employers can sponsor discussion topics and purchase a branded profile.
Glassdoor: The most popular review site in the U.S., Glassdoor has 114 million+ employer reviews and more than 62 million monthly site visitors. Glassdoor offers employer branding and sponsored job services to get your company in front of talent.
Indeed: Often considered first as the world’s largest job board, Indeed attracts more than 250 million monthly site visitors. Likely in response to Google for Jobs, Indeed has improved some of their secondary offerings and now offers an attractive “Company Reviews” section on their site. Company reviews are linked to profiles, so anyone looking at one of your company’s jobs can see what employees have to say about their experience.
InHerSight: Like Fairygodboss, this employer review site is intended for women to leave reviews about their employment experiences. While this platform is very new (they have less than 10 employees at present), it has a lot of potential for growth because of a smooth user experience and great features for candidates. Users create profiles and select the things that matter most to them in an employment experience. Recommended jobs are then matched and delivered directly to candidates.
Ivy Exec: If you’re trying to attract c-suite talent, Ivy Exec is a great employer review site to consider. It offers company profile pages, recent and authentic employee reviews and ratings and in-depth looks at areas that executive candidates care about most.
Job Advisor: An Australian employer review site that launched in 2012. Employers can create visually appealing pages to show off their brand in the Australian market.
Jobcase: A social media platform dedicated to empowering the American workforce. The site offers discussion boards, company reviews, user profiles, coworker ‘praises’ and jobs. The reviews section of their site is pretty inactive so far; however, they claim to have a membership of 70 million+ American users because their technology has powered hundreds of job sites since 2009. Jobcase also received $7 million in venture capital funding in 2017, so they’re worth keeping an eye on!
Rank My Internship: A Canadian anonymous review site for students and recent grads to rate their experiences interning for companies in Canada. Rank My Internship is also integrated with a popular intern and co-op job board in Canada, jobpostings.ca.
Ratemyemployer: Ratemyemployer caters to Canadian employees and employers. Employees can leave in-depth reviews ranging from 1-5 stars on a number of hot-button areas including “Stress”, “Business model, vision and strategy” and “Feedback”.
SEEK: Founded in 1997, SEEK is the top job board in Australia and is also popular in many other APAC locations. The site receives more than 450 million visitors each month and now offers a “Company Reviews” section on their site.
The Job Crowd: An anonymous employer review and early career advice site for new graduates in the UK. The site markets itself as the “TripAdvisor for jobs” and receives millions of visitors per year.
Vault: Vault is a career resource site that encourages employer reviews, internship reviews as well as reviews about academic institutions. They also offer career advice for various professions and industries with the aim of helping professionals and students at each stage of their career journey. Vault has 2.5 million subscribers and offers a range of content marketing campaigns so employers can reach students and professionals with targeted messaging.
Xing: Is a professional social media site that’s particularly popular in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Comparable to LinkedIn, the site pulls in Kununu reviews and displays them front and center on company pages. A fun fact is that Xing has also owned Kununu, Europe’s #1 employer review site, since 2013.
Lesser known (but equally important) employer review sites
There are also a number of sites that, while not specifically created for employer reviews, are being used as sources of employer information by employees. With this in mind, it can be worth monitoring and responding to employees on:
Reddit: There is a subreddit for almost every topic imaginable on Reddit. Even if your company doesn’t have a dedicated subreddit, you may find that it comes up in relevant industry or job-related subreddits, where you can join the conversation and do your part to contribute to the narrative about your employer brand.
Quora: If you search your company name on these platforms, you may find that employees and candidates are asking questions about you. Or, you may find that you’re being mentioned in answers to questions. Either way, Quora is another platform worth mentioning.
Social media: Combing through comments on your content, or mentions in other places around social media, you’ll likely find comments, questions, concerns and straight out reviews by employees and candidates. You can keep track of these mentions manually, or with the help of a social listening tool like Hootsuite.
Pro Tips for Managing Your Employer Reputation
Now that you know where to look, let’s take a look at some pro tips you can use to help you manage your employer reputation effectively:
- Set a regular checking cadence: Check back weekly or monthly to see what new mentions and reviews are popping up to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
- Set up in-platform notifications: To really make sure you’re staying part of the conversation, and be able to promptly respond, you can set up in-platform notifications. Many platforms support this by themselves, such as LinkedIn, but you can also use 3rd-party tools like Hootsuite.
- Monitor your top employer review sites: What employer review site is producing the most traffic to your careers site? You can look to Google Analytics to find this answer and hone in on the sites your candidates are frequenting the most. You can also keep track of the number of reviews across platforms to figure this out as well.
- Respond to negative reviews as much as positive ones: It might be tempting to ignore negative reviews but this does more harm than good. Candidates appreciate when you acknowledge challenge areas at your company, and responding to criticism, especially in a way that explains how you plan to fix it, is helpful for yoru employer brand.
- Repurpose positive reviews and workplace awards as employer brand content: Did an employee leave an especially glowing review on Glassdoor? Repurpose it into a quote and share it across your socials and in your talent network! Similarly, if you win an award like “Best Workplace for Women”, make sure to place the award on your careers site, post it on social and share it across as many other places as possible.
- Use company updates on Glassdoor: Take advantage of Glassdoor’s blogging functionality to post about updates in your company that you think your candidates would care about. This could be an achievement by one of your employee resource groups, a DEI initiative you plan to pursue or a profile piece about one of your employees. All of this can work with regular reviews left on your profile to strengthen your employer brand.
- Ask for feedback: Whether to existing employees or candidates currently interviewing with you, try asking them to leave a review with their honest feedback. For example, you can create a trackable link with a tool like Rally Inside leading to your Glassdoor profile, include it in your talent newsletter and ask people to leave a review. This way, you can take a more proactive approach to generate reviews rather than waiting around and hoping for the best. You can start tracking on a regular basis how many people you’re asking for feedback and correlate this with the number of reviews you’re actually receiving. Once a site gets enough traffic and attention from your target audience, it’s a good time to develop a strategy for how to respond and engage with reviews to manage your employer reputation on the platform.
Using the employer review sites above, and the pro tips outlined here, you can get started building or strengthening an employer reputation campaign today!
For more ways to strengthen your employer brand and attract today’s and tomorrow’s talent, check out our Ideabook, 8 Ways to Prepare for Tomorrow’s Talent!
