For many people in the HR and talent management community the notification that their company has received a new review on Glassdoor is enough to send them into a cold sweat. How many stars have we got? Has somebody said something really bad about us? Who is the poster? All these questions flash through their minds and typify the default, negative attitude the uninitiated often have towards Glassdoor.
But the truth is that Glassdoor has revolutionized the way we learn about employers in the same way that social media and the internet has changed the way we consume news and learn about the world. Like their communications colleagues before them, HR leaders are learning that the days when we could tightly control the messages about employer brand and how potential candidates consume them are over. And they will never come back.
Your employer brand is what employees experience at work and Glassdoor is the platform where your people share these experiences - good and bad. And few people, particularly Millennials and younger people, would take a job today without checking you out on Glassdoor. Their choices will be influenced by what they read.
Rather than ignoring or dismissing Glassdoor, HR professionals should embrace the platform if they really want to position their employer brands in the most positive way. Here are seven steps you can take.
1. Claim Your Profile
Make sure that you own your own company profile or at the very least you know who in your business has. Once you have claimed your profile you can start to use Glassdoor as a positive tool in your employer branding toolkit.
[Related: Unlock Your Free Employer Account]
2. Track Your Glassdoor Ratings
Use the analytics to track your ratings over time. These provide another valuable data point to understand how employee sentiment changes over time, plus how you measure up to competitors. This provides meaningful insight - often with more honesty than you will get through an annual engagement survey.
3. Listen to What People Say
Look at what people are saying in their reviews. If the same issues are consistently reported, or a single location is consistently underperforming, then there is something you need to look at. It's easy to pass off reviews on Glassdoor as a few disgruntled people, but in reality, there is a wide spread of reviews. In fact, Glassdoor reviews tend to be more balanced than other sites, with fewer extreme 1- and 5-star reviews.
4. Respond to Reviews
If you have claimed your profile you can respond to reviews. You should do this whenever you can. This will not only provide balance to what people have said but will say a lot about your openness, transparency and honesty. Your responses to positive reviews are an opportunity to reinforce why you are a great place to work.
5. Radical Transparency on Salaries and Benefits
Rather than having a piecemeal release of your salary and benefits data by individuals, publish all your salary bands and other benefits details. It's going to end up in the public domain anyway, so you might as well do this in a way that avoids misunderstandings or perceptions of unfairness in your pay policies.
[Related: 6 Salary Questions All Managers Should Be Prepared to Answer]
6. Encourage Your People to Post Reviews and Experiences
Encourage all your people to post. You'll be surprised how many want to say good things about your organization! And even if they do say bad things you'll know more about how people feel and what you need to fix. What you should never do is try to post fake reviews or coerce people into saying nice things - it could easily backfire.
Embrace Glassdoor, you'll be surprised how quickly you learn to like it.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse and is reprinted with permission.
