Blog: How to make Glassdoor work for you

Employer Branding

How to make Glassdoor work for you

Claim your company page on Glassdoor and aim to get an Open Company badge
How to make Glassdoor work for you

If I had to name one website that single handedly disrupted the entire hiring and brand building game, I’d have to say Glassdoor. In less than 10 years, Glassdoor has become much more than just a watering hole for disgruntled employees. Having started with the simple thought of being an open platform where employees can anonymously review their employers, the site has now evolved to not only allow organizations to tell their side of the story but also advertise jobs and reach out to more than 27 million candidates, manage their employer brand by being an ‘Open Company’ and become an irreplaceable mine of information.

Reputation sites like Glassdoor have undoubtedly pushed organizations towards transparency. No matter how much flak Glassdoor receives for unmoderated and unreliable data, it is still one of the most referred to sites by top talent. Let’s face it - company websites and highly moderated data is now old fashion. The control of what our employees have to say about us is no longer in our hands. It’s now our turn to question how we can make sites like Glassdoor work for us.

The first obvious step would be to claim your company page on Glassdoor and aim to get an Open Company badge. It is surprising to know just how few companies are aware of the fact that Glassdoor has created a free to use page for any company that they know exists. In all probability your company already exists as either a blank page or with inaccurate and archaic data if you haven’t modified the page. It’s time to take control and use it to manage both prospective and current employees.

It comes as no surprise that Glassdoor is referred by 50% of candidates before applying for a job. It thus makes sense then to leverage the company page on Glassdoor to communicate vision, culture and showcase employer brand. With the ongoing war for talent, candidate experience is going to be a big differentiator and candidate interview experiences on Glassdoor provides valuable information to either improve your process or defend it.

The second step would be to engage with the users on Glassdoor and this goes much beyond just creating a page on the website. It means actively responding to comments, acknowledging the challenges that exist in your organization while simultaneously highlighting the upside. It is common knowledge that job seekers are more likely to believe the upside if you admit to the challenges. Even here, Glassdoor seems to have already thought of this by making it one of the prerequisites to claiming your Open Company badge.

The third is my favorite. Recall your ESAT’s? What’s the biggest challenge there? It’s getting your fence sitters to fill it in. The disgruntled are the first to make an appearance, the highly engaged are next to appear but the rest just keep sitting. Give them a nudge. Here’s a wild thought – start a campaign to get your employees to get out on Glassdoor and tell you what they think on the site instead of this year’s ESAT.

The bottom line is that Glassdoor is now much more than a reputation site – it’s a recruiting and branding tool; it’s a data mine. The amount of information available on Glassdoor is tremendous. It’s a one stop destination for precious information - Be it for benchmarking (Benefits Reviews), improving candidate experience, learning what the best in the industry are doing or to know how your job postings are faring. And it is because they have all this data, they can afford to do this – Roadshows, telling the world how to best run your organization. Amazing, isn’t it?

While one can continue to question the validity of the reports that Glassdoor publishes year on year, one can no longer choose to ignore it. Glassdoor is the world’s biggest water cooler!

So are you listening to what’s being said about you? What are you going to do about it?

Disclaimer: This is a contributed post. The statements, opinions and data contained are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of People Matters and the editor(s).

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Topics: Employer Branding, #Social Media, #TechHR2015

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