Tales From the Digital Side

What will candidates see when they peer through GlassDoor.com and see your organization? Does the thought scare you? If it does, that could be your conscience reminding you that your organization has dirty laundry, baggage and issues (and they all do) that you haven’t addressed.

The user-generated content and peer-to-peer reviews trend is catching up slowly with recruitment. On the consumer side, this is already the case. Who doesn’t search online for product reviews and ratings? Searching for reviews on employers in on the rise and isn’t going to go away. I wrote about JobVent.com last year and they have been steadily increasing traffic (see their Quantcast profile or their Compete profile).

Now there is GlassDoor.com, too. They provide a rating of your organization and post the written pros, cons, and advice to senior management that the reviewer provides. They also have reviewers rate your CEO and provide salary information specific to their job title. The current reviews are only for a few top employers, but I imagine this will expand rapidly over time. There is currently a lot of honesty in the reviews, some are very negative, some are very positive, but a large percent have very balanced views of the organizations and legitimate advice for management. It’s not just the disgruntled workers or bitter former employees, it’s employees that genuinely care about the company. I hope this doesn’t change, I think it’s a good thing.

So, I ask… how is your organization planning on dealing with this? Don’t know? Here are a few suggestions:

• Start doing your own internal reviews. There are many solutions for doing this (including my company’s own QTrac). You must track and know about the issues in order to address them.
• Start listening.. What is being said on these sites is valid, important information. Assign someone to start tracking these sites and your reviews. If the site allows organizations to respond, plan to do so.
• If you do respond, do so honestly. It isn’t going to help for you to try and discredit the reviews or suggest the information is baseless. Respond in a positive way. Address negative feedback by accepting that issues exist and state how they are being addressed.
• Build a ways to communicate. Find ways to open the channels of communication internally. Create an internal blog, community, or review site. Imagine if your intranet included employee ratings for different business units or products. Just think what you could learn. I’m going to call this Employee Intelligence
• Encourage your employees to write reviews. Even bolder – encourage your candidates to read the reviews.

Ultimately, the more you know, the better. The more you listen, the more you will know. The more ways you provide someone to give you feedback, the more feedback you will receive.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 6:42 pm and is filed under employer branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.