The last few years have seen significant growth in the number of organizations being reviewed on Glassdoor. From merely 250 companies in 2008, today Glassdoor has reviews for about 540,000 organizations.

In the past few weeks, I have had an opportunity to speak with multiple leaders from Human Resource function across industries. During discussions on Employer branding and other initiatives, there was one common challenge that I heard from them around Glassdoor.

While most of them agreed that Glassdoor reviews are being read by potential candidates and they generally face queries from prospective candidates on Glassdoor reviews during interviews, most of them admitted that they have been unable to tackle this challenge.

In most cases, they had executed some small programs in silos and had shut them down as they weren’t able to see the results immediately.

While it is a challenge to manage glassdoor reviews but not managing them and simply pushing the problem under the carpet is not going to help.

Below are some points on how negative Glassdoor can impact your business strategy :

IMPACTS YOUR ABILITY TO HIRE RELEVANT TALENT:

According to multiple surveys done by Glassdoor and other firms, even desperate job seekers won’t work for a company with a bad reputation. A senior leader once summed this up in one simple line.

“You won’t even order food from a restaurant whose rating is down”.

The potential employees are more empowered today compared to what they were a few years back. They can easily get inputs on the culture of the organization, their leaders, specific departments and even specific HR policies without even taking the first interview.

This becomes very challenging for the recruitment manager as they are talking to potential candidates who have already formed an opinion about the company.

It hurts a lot more when organizations try and hire for skills in demand like Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, Machine Learning etc.

INCREASES YOUR COST OF DOING BUSINESS:

Your negative ranking can increase your salary cost significantly. For organizations with negative reviews, potential candidates generally ask for a rise between 50 – 65%. This cost directly impacts their Net Margins and can be a hindrance to the organization’s growth plan.

A survey from Deloitte on Millennials and Generation Z employees highlighted a few percentage points of differences between financial Rewards and positive work culture as the motivational factor for joining an organization.

Surprisingly both these factors were the top 2 deciding factors and then came other factors such as flexibility, learning etc. below the ranks.

CREATES A PERCEPTION ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION FOR POTENTIAL CLIENTS:

A lot of potential clients are also looking at Glassdoor reviews and the comments about the organization. Most large deal RFP’s today consider the attrition and retention rates and the steps taken by organizations to improve employee learnings.

No matter what you write in those RFP documents but if those are not corroborated with what your present and ex-employees have been writing about you, it will impact your ability to win new clients.

While there is no official data available on it, I have had the opportunity to discuss this with senior sales folks and they admit to this in closed-door conversations.

While Glassdoor has been the most prominent of the websites on employer reviews, Kununu Launched in 2007 is emerging as a major contender. Kununu today boasts of 3.2 Million reviews for almost 850K employers.

While they are mostly restricted to the North America region, they offer a lot of detailed insights and reviews about a company. Monster has collaborated with them and leverage the ratings at Kununu.

The reason why I highlighted these three points is that digitization is definitely impacting hiring and recruitment in different organizations across the globe.

If your employees aren’t happy but you portray yourself as a great place to work on your website, people can see through your bluff in the era of social media.

Millennials aren’t bothered about paychecks as much they are in learning new things and working in a healthy work culture. When they are thinking of joining your company, they are probably going through your Glassdoor reviews and social media handles to understand what you have to offer and if they find out that you harbour a toxic work culture, they drop the very idea of even giving an interview.

That said it is imperative for organizations to manage their Glassdoor, pushing this problem under the blanket is not going to help the HR teams, instead, it is going to hurt you in other areas.

While organizations can look at only managing the Glassdoor reviews or they can use a holistic employer branding strategy to work on all aspects for building an optimistic employer Brand.

We are experts in Employer Branding and can fix your hiring issues with our Employer Branding solutions. If you are confused with the amount of marketing technology tools in the market, we as marketing technology consultants will guide you towards building the right technology stack.

If you are an entrepreneur looking to brand yourself as a thought leader, we are here for you.

Importance of Fixing Your Employer Brand

IMPACTS YOUR ABILITY TO HIRE RELEVANT TALENT:

INCREASES YOUR COST OF DOING BUSINESS:

CREATES A PERCEPTION ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION FOR POTENTIAL CLIENTS:

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