Your company’s Glassdoor profile is an essential component of your employer brand toolkit. But without a cohesive approach to employer branding, the benefits your company can gain from engaging with Glassdoor will be limited.
Addressing this very issue, our recent webinar “Your Glassdoor Profile and How to Use It to Your Advantage” saw Molly McKinstry, enterprise client partnerships manager at Glassdoor, and Katie Burke, VP culture and experience at Hubspot, sharing best practices for employer branding and engaging with Glassdoor.
Here are the top takeaways from the session.
Employees and candidates are like consumers
The Internet has spawned an age of transparency, where consumers have more access to information that ever before, fundamentally changing the way we buy and the way we look for jobs. The stats speak for themselves:
- Consumers visit at least three websites before making a purchase. (Retailing Today, 2013)
- Job seekers use an average of 18 sources before applying to a job (Inavero, 2015)
- Job seekers look at seven to eight reviews before forming an opinion of a company (Inavero, 2015)
Your employees can tell (and share) your employer brand story without your involvement. That makes it vital that your company take the reins and play its part in shaping its employer brand.
“You need to be comfortable sharing control and thinking about it as a collaborative effort,” says Burke, because one person or department doesn’t own the employer brand. “Our employees, candidates and alums actually create our employer brand,” she says, noting that reviews from working parents do more to reinforce the perception that Hubspot supports families than copy on its careers page.
Culture, mission & values, and people matter
There’s clearly work to be done when 82% of leaders believe company culture gives them a competitive advantage (Deloitte, 2015), yet 87% say it’s a top challenge for their organization (Deloitte, 2015).
Without a mission and supporting values that instill a sense purpose, inform positive behavior and inspire motivation during tough times, employees will be less likely to show up every day with a willingness to contribute to the company’s growth.
Burke advises that everyone—from interns to executives—be able to explain the company mission and list off its values. When your people are your biggest asset, it’s important to engage those who are most passionate as brand ambassadors.
Because employee-shared content receives 5-10x the amplification as brand-shared content (Denise Holt, Collaborative, Inc), there’s incentive to engage your employees’ passion for their work. And a Glassdoor profile is the perfect outlet for your company to both list its mission and core values and offer an outlet for employees to share their story. Be sure to:
- Complete the employer section of your Glassdoor profile in employee-centric language. Define sections by what’s most relevant to the culture of your company.
- Let employees tell their stories in video testimonials, blog posts and social media.
- Utilize company updates to share new content.
Employer branding benefits the bottom line
If business growth, employee retention or meeting hiring goals are among your company’s challenges, strengthen your employer brand.
More than two-thirds of employers believe that retention rates would improve if candidates had a clearer picture of what to expect before taking a job (Harris Poll for Glassdoor, 2014). Articulating your mission and values can help: mission-driven companies achieve 30 percent higher levels of innovation, 40 percent higher levels of retention, and tend to be first or second in their market segment (Deloitte, 2015). Not only that, Glassdoor Best Places to Work outperformed the S&P 500 by 122 percent.
Burke notes Glassdoor was an integral part of Hubspot’s IPO and continues to play a role in its success. Analysts and investors often read Glassdoor reviews to gauge the health of a company. In fact, the first published analyst report about Hubspot included quotes from Glassdoor reviews.
When investors and analysts are paying attention, it’s in your company’s best interest to engage with Glassdoor.
Employer branding comes with its own challenges
Establishing any new function at a company is going to come with challenges—including fighting for budget, determining ownership and defining metrics. Ideally, employer branding will find a natural synergy within an organization’s departmental structure, earning budget by validating its worth through a combination of internal and external data.
A unique employer branding challenge is its intersection with the consumer brand. While the latter is aligned around the value that a product or service provides to customers, the former defines the value of the workplace for employees.
Clearly articulating your employer brand, mapping out your candidate funnel and assigning responsibilities for each portion will go along way toward creating a sustainable employer branding initiative.
Engage with authenticity
Candidates and employees alike appreciate real-world examples, not insider language, rhetoric and jargon. When fashioning employer branding content, use approachable language, while understanding that you can’t be all things to all people.
A strong, unique employer brand allows candidates to self-select their candidacy, as different cultures attract different individuals.
Leverage Glassdoor
From keeping it real to diving into analytics that matter, here’s a quick summary of using Glassdoor like a brand pro:
- Share real stories
- Respond to reviews
- Fill out employer sections with customized tabs
- Link your social media channels
- Post company updates, including awards and announcements
- Monitor talent analytics, including demographics, profile traffic, followers, updates engagement, rating trends and competitor comparisons.
- Become an Open Company
Finally, for more advice on using Glassdoor to promote your employer brand, replay “Your Glassdoor Profile and How to Use It to Your Advantage” or download the slides.
