Why employers need to know and care about Glassdoor
Glassdoor is the fastest growing and most used employer ratings and reviews community with more than 250,000 companies rated and 20 million registered members. For those of you that are not aware of Glassdoor, it is an online career community similar to a TripAdvisor. Like TripAdvisor, Glassdoor enables employees to share their employment experiences with a company, as well as rank the strengths and weaknesses of the employer. Furthermore, the site allows past and current employees to rank their CEO as well as indicate whether or not they would refer a friend to that company. This employee-generated insight is also paired together with the latest job listings there allowing job seekers to see who is hiring and what it’s like to work there.
Most executives are not only surprised to learn of these communities, but are especially surprised when they hear what employees are saying.
Why employers should care about Glassdoor
Since October of last year, Glassdoor has doubled its member growth. Furthermore, with a company vision “to become the largest and most trusted career community that helps people make more informed job decisions and helps companies hire top talent” the site will continue to grow at a rapid rate.
As more and more employees discover Glassdoor, we are seeing a surge of data as they share their thoughts including advice to management. This site has the ability to provide employers with data on employee engagement, brand awareness among job seekers and insights on how the company stacks up against competitors – which is extremely powerful. Of course, if social media is not managed effectively, it does pose a risk to a company; the biggest being the impact on your corporate reputation. Despite the risk, smart companies understand that Social Media can be one of the most positive and impactful ways to build corporate reputation, trust, awareness and engagement with both talent and consumers.
What you can do to manage your brand reputation
1. Use Glassdoor as another channel to promote your employer brand
Many companies like Salesforce, Starbucks and Nordstrom have used Glassdoor as an opportunity to promote their brand through sharing their awards, employer brand videos and highlighting the benefits of working at their organization.
Glassdoor does offer employers two options to communicate with employees and candidates– a Free Employer Account or an Enhanced Employer Profile which is a paid service.
Regardless of whether you edit basic information or purchase an enhanced employer profile, make sure you are clear on what your employee value proposition is. Do you know what your employees value about your organization and do you know the perceptions candidates have about your workplace?
2. Solicit feedback from your brand ambassadors
To preserve the authenticity of Glassdoor and your brand, you don’t want to tell your employees what to say– but you can make your brand ambassadors aware of the site and that you would love them to share their thoughts with prospective employees.
3. Have a policy/process on managing feedback
According to Glassdoor, “the majority of reviews on Glassdoor (67%) have employees reporting they are “ok or satisfied” at their jobs.” That being said, there is the possibility that an employer may receive a negative review. Although Glassdoor does permit employers who sign up for a free account to respond directly to feedback, you need to think carefully how you should approach this. Regardless of the approach you take you should be consistent and respond to both positive and negative reviews. Glassdoor has provided some great tips on how to respond to reviews.
http://www.glassdoor.com/employers/community-guidelines/respond-to-reviews/
A recent study conducted by LinkedIn, found that “job seekers are two times more likely to select an employer based on the company’s employer brand than the corporate brand,” emphasizing how critical an employer branding strategy is for corporate growth and differentiation in the next few years. Sites like Glassdoor will continue to grow and therefore we encourage all employers to have an employer brand strategy including a social media and reputation management strategy.
With more than 13 million people per month using Glassdoor, we predict it will become a de facto site for job seekers prior to applying or accepting their next position in the next two years. We are excited by Glassdoor’s vision and the authenticity it brings to the corporate employer brand execution.