Protecting Your Employment Firm’s Brand on Glassdoor

You’re probably already familiar with the job site Glassdoor. But if not, here’s a quick primer:

Glassdoor considers itself “the world’s most transparent career community that is changing the way people find jobs and companies recruit top talent.”

It provides a collection of great job listings like many of the other job aggregators. But what’s a bit different is it pairs those listings with user-generated content including salary reports (specific to employers), employee reviews and ratings, CEO approval ratings and more.

It’s a great concept really. It can be extremely beneficial for job seekers as they move forward with their career search. It can also be great for those top-tier employers that employees just love. You know the Googles, SASs and others that continually rank well on Fortune’s List of Best Companies to Work For.

Those companies can generally get away with a few bad reviews — especially since they have such great employment reviews everywhere else. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have the rabid, evangelistic employees that these big players do.

In fact, for most employers, a bad review or two can have a dramatic negative impact on recruiting efforts. So what can you do?

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Here are some tips for protecting your employment brand on Glassdoor:

1. Look at your reviews! Sounds like common sense huh? Well I know firsthand that most companies have no idea what’s being said about them on Glassdoor or other review sites for that matter. Go to the review section of Glassdoor and search for your company. While you’re there, check out your competitors too.
2. Sign up for an account on Glassdoor. By signing up for a free employer account on Glassdoor, you’ll be able to add more detail about your company, upload photos, edit contact details and more.
3. Respond to reviews. After you have an employer account, you’ll be able to comment on reviews posted to your company page as an official “employer representative.” What you don’t want to do is get overly defensive or personal. What you should do though, is be transparent and honest. If you did have a morale issue, don’t be afraid to admit it and then explain what you’ve done since to fix it. Showing that you’re open to constructive criticism and taking the needed steps to improve can go a long way.
4. Get proactive about reviews. All too often I see employers just sit back and wait for reviews–they deal with bad reviews when they finally see them. That’s a really bad strategy (or complete lack of strategy)! Instead of sitting back, get pro-active. Go out and solicit reviews so that you control your brand’s reputation. If you don’t currently have reviews, 1-2 bad reviews that pop up can be disastrous. On the other hand, if you proactively build 50 glowing reviews and 1-2 bad reviews pop up, that’s a whole different story.

So how do staffing and recruiting firms go about getting reviews?

It starts by asking! After placing a candidate on assignment, ask them to leave a review. Encourage happy candidates to share reviews on multiple platforms too. Build this into the process your recruiters and coordinators follow with every assignment. You might also consider using a service to help automate the process (Haley Marketing offers a reputation management service for staffing agencies that makes getting reviews easy).

Whatever approach you take, be sure to take one! The worst thing you can do is sit and hope for more positive reviews and less negative ones. Get ahead of things and encourage your raving fans to share their story online. It will make your recruitment efforts so much more fruitful.

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