A negative Glassdoor review does more than tarnish your company’s reputation. It kills your dream, drives a wedge between you and prospective customers, and gets in the way of your growth.
The same can be said about fake reviews.
Come to think of it. Candidates aren’t dumb. They can tell the difference between legitimate reviews and fake ones.
Also, according to a LinkedIn report, the cost of hiring for companies with strong employer brands is two times lower than one with a flimsy one. Positive reviews also expose your brand to a larger talent pool.
Not to mention, they attract better job candidates.
Why Does Your Company Need Positive Glassdoor Reviews?
Positive Glassdoor reviews signify strong work culture, a good employer brand, and happy employees.
Imagine you’re working as the HR head of a company.
One of the company’s employees leaves and goes to Glassdoor to leave a bad review. They leave a one-star rating for the CEO and an awful review of the company’s work culture.
You Glassdoor rating drops from, say, 4 to 3. The CEO also sends you an email about the negative review demanding an explanation.
As the HR manager, what do you do?
You can’t delete the review (unless you have enough evidence to prove it’s malicious or illegal). Nor can you track down the employee and ask them to delete it or write something else, considering some of these reviews are anonymous.
More than 22 million users visit Glassdoor to check ratings, read reviews and interview experiences for more than 300,000 companies worldwide. These are the candidates you’re targeting.
They’re well-informed and super-picky about the companies they choose to send their applications to.
In other words, you want to attract the most qualified applicants without necessarily paying for them. That can result in as low as 30% lower cost per hire.
How do Negative Glassdoor Reviews Impact Your Business?
Increased Cost of Hiring
As we’ve already mentioned, the cost per hire is two times lower for brands with strong employer brands.
Also, the more your company is reviewed positively, the more it’s exposed to a larger talent pool and the better the candidates it attracts.
Glassdoor receives about 60M users per month. You can imagine how tedious it can be to recruit a suitable candidate from the platform.
But with good reviews, suitable candidates will gravitate toward you. But with bad reviews, you have to compensate for it by paying high recruitment costs.
Business Operations and Growth
Studies show that more than half of consumers won’t do business with a company if it has a rating of less than 4 out of 5.
From this, it’s safe to say that negative Glassdoor reviews affect your company’s profitability. They also damage your trustworthiness and prestige.
Strategic partnerships suffer the most when a company receives negative reviews.
Things get worse when the rating is about the company’s CEO.
Low CEO Rating
Glassdoor allows its users to rate their CEOs. In this case, a low CEO rating spells doom for the company.
According to Provoke Media, nearly half of the executives attribute their corporate reputation to CEOs.
The last few years have seen people become a significant part of businesses to the extent that we now have roles to oversee them and their culture.
These roles are focused on two things:
- Employee engagement
- Experiences that create a high-performing workforce with companies
With remote work becoming the trend, people and culture have become central for companies.
Ultimately, companies with a better work culture attract top talents, a solid brand reputation, and more revenue.
So, how do you improve your Glassdoor reviews?
7 Steps to Improve Your Glassdoor Reviews
1. Conduct a Glassdoor Review Audit
Ideally, this should be the first thing you do. Before you even optimize your profile and respond to the reviews you have so far, you want to assess everything and know your current standing.
You want to qualify and quantify how bad and good the reviews are.
The information you gather will help you keep track of your observations (in a spreadsheet, preferably).
Here are a few key metrics and findings you want to specifically pay attention to while auditing your Glassdoor profile:
- Your total score: That’s your overall rating out of five (like 3.5/5).
- How many reviews do you have in total? You want to take the total count of the reviews you have.
- How many reviews do you get in a month? You can look at the number of reviews you’ve been receiving per month for the past year.
- How many of the ratings you have are from your current employees?
- How many of the ratings you have are from your former employees?
- What’s the average star rating of your current employees?
- What’s the average star rating of your former employees?
- You also want to arrange the complaints by type (salary, office gossip, politics, etc.).
After extracting these key insights, you should clearly see who’s tarnishing your reputation (your current employees, former ones, etc.) and why.
You should also know how to tackle the exact issue and improve your employees’ experiences.
For example, if 90% of the complaints you’re receiving are about poor management, that should indicate underlying communication issues between your management and employees.
2. Claim Your Free Employer Account and Optimize It
Inaccurate and outdated information will damage your reputation as much as negative reviews.
If you haven’t done so, you want to start by claiming your free Glassdoor employer account.
After that, you want to go through the information and update it. See if there are any reviews you can respond to.
You also want to flag anything you consider inappropriate.
Even more important, you want to gain access to the employer centre and go through the analytics, particularly your profile demographics and page views.
You also want to sign up for alerts to be notified whenever someone posts something new.
3. Adapt Based on the Reviews You Receive
Instead of hiding or flagging negative reviews, why not go through them all to identify the pattern? See what’s driving them. Is it low pay? Career advancement? Politics? Work gossip?
The idea is to recognize the pattern and nip it from the bud.
You want to understand the pulse of your employees. What makes them tick?
Use employee engagement surveys and feedback to look for suggestions and then use them to build an employee-first work culture.
Online reputation management won’t help your business if your problem is work culture.
Or should we say, unhappy employees, unhappy company.
4. Start Responding to Reviews
One of the best practices for tackling online reviews is reviewing them from time to time. See what people are saying about your brand and respond to every review, including the negative ones.
Don’t panic or get scared whenever someone leaves you a one-star review. Instead, take your time to understand why the person reviewed it that way and then learn from it.
You also want to react to it professionally. Don’t twist or be quick to defend your company or brand. Instead, you want to thank them for bringing it up and inform them that you’re doing something to fix the issue.
65% of Glassdoor users agree that you can improve an employee’s response by responding to it. How you react to a negative review has an even bigger impact than the review itself.
One way to counter negative reviews is by asking some of your responsible, long-standing employees, to support the reviews.
Most of the negative reviews you’ll receive will be anonymous. You want to organize a private meeting and show genuine concern when they occur. Let them know you’re willing to mediate the problem and reach an amicable solution.
You also want to acknowledge the negative review and let them know how important it is.
5. Encourage Your Employees to Review You
If your brand doesn’t have reviews or has fewer reviews, you want to start by talking to your employees. Tell them how important the reviews are to your organization, and encourage them to leave one for your brand.
Walk them through the review process and ensure they understand how the system works.
In addition to the reviews, Glassdoor also provides a range of employee ratings, such as employee performance, satisfaction, and job security.
Getting your employees to review your brand will work wonders for your brand. Don’t tell your employees to review you positively. Instead, focus on improving employee experience, and positive reviews will trickle in on their own.
Here’s what you want to do:
- Choose one of your employees and make them your point person: The employee should be responsible for reviewing your practice.
You don’t want to reach out to all the employees at once. Otherwise, things will look suspicious when you only have a few reviews one day and a barrage of them the next day.
- Create a Review Schedule for your Long-tenured, Happy Clients: The idea is to spread them out. You also want them to schedule these posts, so they appear random.
- Ask the Employees that want to post reviews to contact your point person: All the employees who wish to post a review can only do so after contacting your point person. Your point person is responsible for getting them on schedule.
- If the employees are unsure of what to post, suggest to them to post what it’s like to work at the company. They can talk about the company’s culture.
The idea is to get them to talk about things no one else would know unless they work for the company.
If anything, employees don’t just read Glassdoor to see if the work environment fits them. They also want to see what the company’s culture is like.
6. Have a Strategy in Place
If your company is getting a lot of negative reviews, you want to take a step back and see what it is you’re doing wrong.
If possible, find the employees and talk to them unless they’re anonymous.
Talk to your entire staff and let them know that you’ve read their complaints and want to work with them to right the wrong.
You also want to identify some of your happy employees and ask them to leave a review behind.
You also want to capitalize on those key moments when your employees are happy like right after they join your team, receive awards, promotions, bonus days, etc.
Use these moments to talk to your employees and ask them to review your company. Since they’re happy, it’s less likely they’ll have anything negative to say about your brand.
You want to back up their claim by posting some of their happy photos on your Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts.
Work-life balance, culture, and employee engagement are a few of the things job seekers look for when deciding which company to work for. And pictures convey much more than words.
7. Tools
Imagine a tool automatically asking engaged employees to leave a review on Glassdoor.
It’s even better when the same tool can reach out to disgruntled employees and hear them out.
Many Glassdoor tools can help you automatically manage the reviews you receive and turn things around.
That’s even more important if you work with a remote team. Plus, the chances are you’ve already invested in a people insight tool.
You can use this tool to solicit positive reviews and post them on Glassdoor.
8. Hire an Agency
You can hire an agency to manage your Glassdoor profile. Maybe you didn’t know, but you can use the user-generated content on Glassdoor to strengthen your SEO.
What you don’t want to do is to treat Glassdoor as an afterthought. That’s because these sites are critical to the overall success of your company.
You want to be proactive, responding to the reviews as they come in, both good and bad.
Doing this shows that you’re paying attention and are equally concerned about the feedback you receive.
If you don’t have time to do this or don’t have someone you can delegate the job to, then common sense dictates you hire someone.
And before you can go ahead and hire an ORM, you want to note that these companies charge vastly varying amounts.
For instance, you may find that while one agency charges $1000 per month, another one charges about $200 a year. This is not to say that you should go with the cheapest option. Instead, before you sign up with any ORM service, you want to get a detailed breakdown of their rates and the specific services to expect.
9. Glassdoor Rating Improvements Take Time
Glassdoor rating improvements are a long shot. Things aren’t going to change overnight or after a few attempts to get your employees to review you. You have to give it time and continue improving your employee experiences for the ratings to improve.
You can share your own experiences as an employer. You want to be genuine with everything. Give them a clear picture of what happens at your practice.
Ask the people to be open-minded and see if things are as indicated in the reviews. See if they can give you a chance to prove that you’re not anything you’re portrayed in the reviews.
10. Create Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
Why should an employee work with you and not any other company? What makes you unique?
The cost of employee disengagement can be high. You can take an active, pre-emptive approach to prevent this from happening.
You want to start by preparing an EVP.
An EVP summarizes everything of value your company provides to their employees – like higher pay, training, career development, networking opportunities, health benefits, etc.
You can document your EVP, market it, and sell it to your current and potential employees.
The goal is to attract new talent and retain existing employees.
Your EVP should also include a mission statement, an inspirational elevator pitch that articulates your organization’s goals and emotionally unifies your workforce.
11. Promote Your Brand
Social media is an excellent place to start, especially for people in sales.
You can start by promoting your brand on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. s
The reviews you receive on Glassdoor will have a star rating. You want to use that to promote your brand and entice new candidates.
You also want to create links to some of your top reviews and post them on your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Don’t forget to add the Glassdoor badge on your website next to your job adverts.
12. Build Your Brand on Glassdoor
While Glassdoor can be considered only a tiny part of your branding strategy, the platform can make or break your business.
We suggest you learn to take the platform seriously. Take advantage of all the opportunities the platform presents.
You also want to include a video and complete your profile with every piece of information a potential candidate may find helpful.
Talk about your company culture, benefits, and everything else.
After bringing your profile up to snuff, you want to monitor all the activities happening there regularly.
In addition to responding to reviews, you want to share updates on your company culture, work environment, revised benefits, etc.
You also want to assign someone full-time to keep tabs on your company profile. Their job should be to monitor feedback and get as many of your employees as possible to leave their reviews behind at scheduled intervals.
They must look at employee experiences, ensure your products are up-to-date, and, most importantly, update your profile with pictures and videos that showcase your team and culture.
