Glassdoor: A Wake-Up Call For Companies

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Glassdoor was launched in the US in 2008 and a few months ago they opened their London office. The site is a real wake-up call for companies and in-house recruitment teams as there is no hiding from it. If your company has a bad reputation it won’t be long before everyone knows about it. The question is what to do about it? The initial reaction from most people is to rush to flood the site with positive reviews of the company in order to counteract the negative ones. This reaction has some merit and can be a sensible approach; however these reviews need to be “real” and not coerced as you simply can’t manufacture a company culture or image, the power of social media means you’ll soon be found out.

In 2013 more than 500 000 reviews were submitted to Glassdoor.
It is, at the time of writing, ranked as the 401st most visited site in the US & 1000th most visited in the UK.
The majority of traffic, 72%, comes from search engines with about 20% direct to the site.
Facebook provides the vast majority of their social media traffic at 75%.
Glassdoor has 3 main measures of a company.

Overall rating (out of 5)
CEO rating as a %age
“Recommend to a Friend” as a %
The site also carries company comparisons of benefits info, salary info, interview reviews, management and leadership.

A large part of the power of Glassdoor comes from the fact all reviews are south korea phone number resource anonymous, meaning that people will feel empowered to tell the truth with no detrimental effects to themselves. When you factor in that more people will visit the site to moan or vent their frustrations than they will to tell you how excellent you are, you can see what a detrimental effect there could be to your employer brand. With this in mind I recommend fully embracing Glassdoor and building your presence on it by buying the enhanced profile and ensuring you have compelling content. With careful mngt you can use the site to address issues and respond to reviews. Well positioned responses are very powerful especially if you get buy-in from your CEO or Senior Managers and use them to reply to reviews; and not just the bad ones as seeing a “thank-you, I am really happy that you enjoy working here, we take our company culture and values very seriously…” style response to a positive review is an extremely powerful brand builder and arguably just as important as addressing the negative comments.