Much has been said about the value of nurturing your reputation in attracting and retaining customers or clients. However, less often talked about is the ability of online reputation management (ORM) to boost your reputation as an entity that hires employees – the people working toward the success of your products or services.
But what if you apply the same ORM metrics – generally, star ratings and reviews – to enhance your employer branding? Would it make a difference in attracting and retaining top talent?
The short answer is yes.
A 2019 Glassdoor/Harris Poll revealed that 86 percent of employees and job seekers are likely to research company reviews and ratings in shortlisting their prospects. In addition, a Glassdoor United States site survey in the same year showed that the majority (over 65 percent) of users read at least five reviews before forming an opinion of a brand or business.
Amid the Great Resignation, paying attention to how potential employees perceive your company is more crucial than ever. The Glassdoor employee reviews are just one example. You can create an employer branding strategy that integrates end-to-end reputation management services, such as review monitoring, generation and response. In turn, these can bolster your rankings in search results, which enable you to reach new talent.
“Employees and prospects check Google and are influenced subliminally by the review scores and visible star rating on page 1 of results,” said Tim Clarke, Rize Reviews’ Senior Reputation Manager.
Let’s flesh out all the information you’ve just read in the sections that follow:
- The definition of employer branding
- The importance of employer branding
- The importance of online reviews in building a strong brand
- Ways to use ORM solutions to improve employer branding
What Is Employer Branding?
The popular professional networking site Linkedin defines employer branding as how you market your company to desired job seekers. According to the Harvard Business Review, it has three essential components, which you must establish to stand out from the competition. These are:
Reputation
This is the public perception of your business. And in the context of employer branding, it’s seen through the lens of potential employees.
Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
From a practical perspective, work is an exchange between the company and its employees. You set requirements and expectations of how people should perform and behave in your organization. In return, employees trade their time and effort for rewards and benefits, including but not limited to salary, professional development opportunities, a sense of belonging and/or purpose and work-life balance.
Employee Experience
If the rewards and benefits are promises you make to prospective employees, the employee experience pertains to your ability to deliver on those promises. A positive employee experience rewards people accordingly if they meet responsibilities and expectations.
Why Employer Branding Is Important
We already mentioned earlier that reputable employer brands find more success in recruiting and retaining excellent employees. And employee reviews contribute a lot to this. Get this: 55 percent of job seekers would not pursue an application if they read negative employee reviews online.
Aside from improving your chances of getting the best people on board, here are a few things that highlight the importance of employer branding:
- Reduce recruitment costs: Lower your spending on seeking top candidates as they find you and apply to your company instead of you scouring the web for them.
- Turn employees into brand ambassadors: As you get employee feedback more and more with a positive tone, your brand also becomes more attractive to prospects.
- Engage employees: Employee branding involves dishing out a beneficial employee experience. So the better you are at delivering on your promise, the more motivated and productive your people will be.
The Importance of Online Reviews in Building a Strong Brand
So, now that you know why employer branding is important, how do employee reviews fit into your employer branding strategy? Here are a few ways that come to mind:
- Honesty during hiring: Reputation management consultants caution against painting an unrealistic picture of your company just to lure a top candidate. Online reviews can keep you attuned to the employee experience, from which you can base the promises you make to prospects.
- Changes from within: Glassdoor employee reviews, for instance, include the cons of working for a particular company. While some reviewers tend to underline the negative aspects (hello, former disgruntled employees), you can choose this opportunity to show you value your people’s opinions. Responding to negative reviews is one way to do that. Here, you can mention that you will consider the feedback or correct the perception if you have already introduced changes regarding the reviewers’ complaints.
- Employee feedback as part of company culture: Get employee feedback as frequently as you would give it – even more so. Make it a part of the core of your company culture, creating a safe space for employees to voice their opinions while maximizing the chance to achieve genuine change and growth.
How To Leverage ORM To Boost Employer Branding
Now that we’ve established the importance of online reviews, let’s look into the ORM methods you can use to take your employer branding to the next level:
Integrate Review Monitoring
Keep an eye on your ratings and reviews to check employee pulse, gauge their experience, discover opportunities to improve it and get ahead of a brewing crisis. You can also monitor your competitors’ employer reviews, find gaps in their approach and fill them.
Improve Review Response
Responding to negative reviews is critical to proactive online reputation management. It enables you to stay on top of a public relations (PR) crisis while showing existing and potential employees that you welcome all kinds of feedback, good or bad. And that you take it all in stride.
Increase Review Generation
If you’re starting out, you can set your sights on conquering Glassdoor first. Have a good review generation strategy in place to amplify results.
We send SMS and email requests to employees and former employees with links to leave a review for the client’s company profile on Glassdoor. We filter out 1-3 star reviews in advance to a private feedback form. [As for] 4-5 stars, we link the user to Rize Glassdoor’s “Write a review” form for quick completion.
– Tim Clarke, Senior Reputation Consultant, Rize Reviews
Innovate With the Best of the Best Online Reputation Management Companies
If you’d rather focus on what you do best – such as selling your products or service – you can outsource ORM to online reputation management companies that understand the importance of employer branding. At Rize Reviews, we lend clients our expertise and provide them access to our reputation management tool, preventing costly errors and saving you time, energy and money in the long run.
Start Small, Win Big
As we said above, you can start with Glassdoor employee reviews and then expand to other platforms. The beauty of leveraging Glassdoor is that most of its users are job seekers.
But whether you want to start small or launch an end-to-end employer branding strategy from the get-go, consider working with reputation management consultants to eliminate errors. At Rize Reviews, we provide you with the help and support you need to build a reputable employer brand.
First of all, we practice what we preach. Our parent company, Thrive, used our employee review response and generation solutions to get a good score on Glassdoor and Indeed. Next, we don’t just know why employer branding is essential; we are well-versed in translating this into action. For example, Clarke said we had one client called Breakthrough Behavior in Florida that got approximately eight new 5-star reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed from us in three months.
So, get employee feedback with assistance from our ORM consultants and through automated review monitoring, generation and response courtesy of our online reputation management tool.
From monitoring the inflow of feedback to responding to negative reviews, you can leverage Rize’s reputation management services today. Contact us to learn more about your initial steps.
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