It’s hard to overstate the importance of Glassdoor in today’s tight hiring market.
If you’re on a quest for top talent to fill critical positions, your job is made even more difficult if there is a gap between your rating and the companies that you are competing with for talent. In a job seeker’s market, people don’t simply expect to get a job, they expect a great job with a great company. Enough poor employee reviews on your Glassdoor site, and you may start to see an impact on the kind of compensation and benefit packages you need to deploy to lure those stars away from the clutches of your competitors. In the case of a more meaningful reputational problem, you may not be able to compete at all. You won’t even be in the ballpark. That’s because top talent consults Glassdoor to find out what it’s really like to work at any given company. Make no mistake. Those ratings matter.
So what happens if a few bad apples have dragged your rating down? It’s time to do some damage control. This isn’t about asking your employees to post good reviews — those kinds of suspicious bundles of posts attract the watchful eye of the Glassdoor gatekeepers and can wind up in the news. Just ask SAP how they got on Glassdoor’s list of best companies to work for this year. (Hint: Glowing employee ratings flooded into Glassdoor on one day, close to the deadline for consideration for the list.)
So what do you do? As the old saying goes, walk the walk. As in, look at your internal processes, procedures, and policies, especially the unwritten ones, and make sure you’re treating your employees with the respect they deserve. And, it’s not just about active employees. You need to consider the entire employee life cycle.
When it comes to terminations and layoffs, it’s critical to handle these situations correctly. Or that same flood of glowing reviews could deluge your site, but in the opposite direction.
At GetFive, we know how important outplacement is when you’re faced with a layoff. We help employer brands reach their full potential through our Active Engagement process. By ensuring that outbound employees are immediately focusing on their careers — rather than the frustrations and fears of sudden unemployment — we can help you reduce the adverse impact on your social reputation.
Investing in the future success of your employees in transition builds greater employer trust and helps position you as an employer of choice. Your outgoing employees will be forever grateful that they were treated with dignity and provided a career transition benefit that made a real difference at a truly stressful moment. And doing so creates goodwill and trust with surviving employees, too. That’s a critical component of the process because a layoff without any sort of outplacement help creates an atmosphere of distrust and even fear around the office. The “Will I be next?” syndrome leads to good people checking their LinkedIn and Indeed sites daily.
Even though the job market is strong at the moment, job search is never easy when you are caught up in a unexpected layoff. People today need technology-enhanced, high-impact coaching to execute a smooth and speedy transition. GetFive delivers. If you’d like to learn more, contact us today.
