How to Manage Your Employer Brand on Glassdoor

employer-brand

The internet gives us an unprecedented opportunity to share information about anything, including experiences working for, or interviewing with particular companies. Prior to the internet age, people could only tell others about a positive or negative interaction with an employer through word of mouth. But with the emergence of social media, Glassdoor and other sites, companies now have to actively build and manage their employer brand in order to attract the best candidates available when hiring.

The ins and outs of Glassdoor

Glassdoor was founded in 2007 and quickly became “Yelp for employers.” There are similar sites, such as JobVent, Salary.com, PayScale and Telanu, but most job seekers check out Glassdoor when considering applying to or accepting an offer with a company.

Glassdoor allows people to review companies in a few different ways. The first is former or current employees can rate their experience on a one-to-five star scale and write a headline, pros, cons, and advice for management. These reviews can be left anonymously so no one has to worry about damaging their professional reputation or getting in trouble with their employer.

Employees can also share their salary on Glassdoor. This is also done anonymously and aggregated by job title and location so job seekers will have some idea of what the position they’re interested in pays.

In addition to reviews from employees, candidates can review companies’ hiring processes. People can share what role they applied for, a few sentences on their interview experience, the questions they were asked and how long the process took. They can also give a thumbs up or thumbs down on the experience and share if they were made an offer and if they accepted it.

Why Glassdoor reviews matter

Unfortunately, Glassdoor reviews can skew negative. Like Yelp, people will be more compelled to write a review if they feel like they’ve been wronged. And it’s easy for people to feel that way if they were terminated, left for a better opportunity or didn’t get hired for a job they interviewed for – even if the employer did nothing wrong.

That being said, job seekers give a lot of credence to Glassdoor reviews. According to a recent study, 48 percent of job seekers consulted the site during their search. That equates to 38 million unique monthly visitors for the website.

If your company doesn’t actively work on protecting its employer brand on Glassdoor, negative reviews will hurt your hiring pipeline. They’ll build up and detract savvy job seekers from applying to your company. But with a little effort, your company can actually use Glassdoor to support your recruiting and hiring efforts and build a favorable employer brand.

Tips for building a successful employer brand on Glassdoor

It doesn’t take much effort to create a solid company page on Glassdoor. Follow these tips and you’ll soon see that a few negative reviews aren’t the end of the world.

Respond to reviews

Employers are able to reply to the reviews left on their company profile. It’s always a good idea to respond to every review, both positive and negative, to show job seekers that you care. Don’t get defensive, since that attitude is never perceived well online. Instead, say the feedback has been taken into account and your company will try to do better.

Learn about the employee experience

In addition to replying to negative reviews, use them as an opportunity to learn how your company can improve. As we mentioned earlier, some people will exaggerate if they feel like they’ve been wronged but others will be fair and actually tell you the real pros and cons of your company. This information gives you a great opportunity to improve your operations since it’s left anonymously, often by former employees.

Add content to your company page

In many ways, your Glassdoor page can become a second careers website. You can add photos, videos, a mission statement, values and even your open jobs. Adding as much content as possible can help your company control the narrative and encourage job seekers to gloss over the reviews section.

Ask your current employees to leave reviews

It’s always a good idea to let your current employees know they should leave Glassdoor reviews but be careful how you go about it. Many recruiting and HR teams send out company-wide emails making the request but that can cause too many “Best job ever” and “Amazing company to work for” reviews to be left with similar posting dates on them. Job seekers can tell these reviews weren’t left naturally so a better approach is to ask a few employees at a time or make the request when someone is leaving the company on good terms.

Make Glassdoor work for your brand

Some companies don’t like that Glassdoor gives employees and interviewees the ability to review them and choose to ignore it all together. Don’t be one of those companies. Use Glassdoor to your advantage and you’ll find that the site supports your hiring efforts more than it hurts it.

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