In the age of online reviews — Yelp for shops and services, Amazon for products, and Trip Advisor for travel — individuals are constantly seeking feedback and advice before making purchasing decisions. This is no different for job seekers! With sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and Comparably, job seekers can read feedback from current and former employees to get a glimpse inside of organizations. On average, job seekers read between 7-9 reviews on any given organization before applying to a job. It’s important for companies to engage with these reviews to show their candidates and employees that they value employee feedback. Responding to reviews has proven to help improve one’s employer brand. In fact, 69% of job seekers said their impression of a company improved after seeing that the employer responded to a Glassdoor review.
Do you currently engage with Glassdoor reviews? Are you looking to start? We’ve got plenty of tips for you!
SETTING UP YOUR GLASSDOOR STRATEGY
The first step to starting any new program is to plan, plan, plan! Having an organized approach to monitoring and responding to your employee reviews will make the process run smoothly. Here are some things to consider when starting an employer brand monitoring initiative:
Who are the stakeholders?
Responding to employee reviews on public platforms often requires input from cross-functional teams. First, you’ll need to internally decide what team has ownership of your Glassdoor and Indeed profiles and who will be monitoring and responding to the reviews. Typically, companies choose to give ownership to their talent acquisition, employer branding, or HR teams.
If this is the case, you’ll want to consult with other functions in the organization, so that you are best prepared for crafting responses. Your marketing and communications departments are great resources to connect with to ensure that your responses are on brand.
In addition, employees may bring up sensitive topics (e.g. harassment, HR violations, theft, etc.) that may require input from your legal and HR teams on for feedback. It’s best to sit down with these teams when planning your Glassdoor response strategy to develop an escalation process and determine what topics you will need to send alerts for.
How often will you respond to reviews?
The cadence in which you respond to reviews will depend on how many reviews you receive on a monthly basis. If your organization receives 10 or less reviews a month, setting up a monthly response schedule is a great option. For larger organizations, especially ones that have many locations (retail, restaurant, financial firms, etc.), you may be want to consider responding to reviews on a weekly basis to prevent large amounts of reviews from piling up.
What reviews should I respond to?
A good rule of thumb is to try respond to the majority of reviews you receive – both positive and negative! As an employer, you want to let your reviewers know that you have read their review, that you hear them, and that you care about their perspective. To help you determine what reviews you should respond to and which you should refrain from engaging, check out this article that includes a helpful breakdown.
I won’t spend too much time in this post discussing what to write in your responses – if you’d like to learn more about this please check out our other blog post.
Getting Prepared to Respond
If I could share one tip about replying to reviews, it would be to develop a response template! Read through all your reviews from the past few months. What topics keep appearing? Develop templates based on reoccurring topics.
Some common themes include work-life balance, management, career growth opportunities, communication, scheduling, and benefits & compensation. However, depending your organization, you may have your own unique themes.
Always be sure to personalize each response and tweak the template – you want to be genuine and address each review specifically!
ANALYZING AND SHARING REVIEW INSIGHTS
Developing a response strategy is only half of the program! Yes, it’s great to read your employee feedback and respond to their concerns. But if your brand monitoring program ends there, you may fall short when it comes to transparency. Let’s examine how to share the content of your reviews and take action within your organization.
Identifying Trends
As you monitor your reviews, what topics keep appearing? While many employees may note your benefits as a pro, it’s important to take note if you receive reoccurring reviews that specifically mention one specific aspect of your benefits package. We help our clients track trends by noting common themes in our reports. This makes it easy to visualize data and see what your top themes are for certain business cycles.
Utilize Glassdoor analytics to take a deeper dive into your locations and positions. In your employer center, you can examine the amount of reviews and average ratings for each location across your organization. This is extremely useful for larger organizations to identify locations of concern.
What locations have the lowest ratings? Take extra time to read through the reviews for these locations and try to examine if there are particular aspects of these areas that are causing the low ratings. Is there a problematic manager? A shortage of support? Share conclusions and feedback with your leadership teams.
On the flipside, location insights help you determine which locations are the highest performing. What is occurring within these areas that is leading to higher levels of employee satisfaction? Read reviews from these areas to see what is working well. You can also use this information to strategize when it comes to encouraging employees to write reviews.
Distributing Insights & Feedback
Now that you’re starting to gather insights and analyze your review data, you need to share it! Creating brand monitoring reports is simple thanks to Glassdoor’s employer center. You can easily screenshot your historical rating trends broken out by segment (Overall Employee Satisfaction, Culture & Values, Work/Life Balance, Senior Management, Compensation & Benefits, and Career Opportunities).
Customize your reports by changing the time period to a relevant date range. (We’d recommend creating quarterly reports, but every company’s needs are different!) In your report, include the themes you identified in the reviews for that time period. To give your audience context to the top themes of the period, pull a few quotes from the reviews. Showcase the highest and lowest rated locations and develop an action plan to share the feedback with their respective leaders.
Creating social content
As a social media maven myself, I’m always on the lookout for great ideas for social posts. What better way to showcase your company culture, than by sharing employee stories? Lucky for you, you have an entire library of employee reviews to pull quotes from! Utilize your positive employee reviews and create simple social posts highlighting snippets of your employees’ pros and unique experiences.
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Looking for more resources or interested in starting an employer brand monitoring program for your organization? Let us help! Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to the Recruitics team.
