This advent calendar presents 24 practical suggestions from Potentialpark's upcoming research study on how to improve the candidate experience. With a special bonus at the end.
All employers struggle with critical reviews. And I always thought it’s impossible to reply to all of them (without using copy + paste).
Until one day, at an event in New York, an Employer Branding manager shared her secret routine: “Every week I sit down one night with a bottle of wine, open Glassdoor and reply to all the reviews in one go.”
I don’t know if those answers met the CI. But they were probably unique. And thus, not a bad move for a reputation management strategy.
To help you with your own reputation management, this Door will bust three myths around rewview platforms that you should know about.
1. The world’s most successful review platform is… not Glassdoor
But Indeed. Go figure.
Indeed has the most eyeballs on reviews, the most users and traffic.
The reason is that Indeed is… the world’s most successful job board. And over the past years jobs and reviews have become two sides of the same coin. Review platforms added jobs to their sites (to earn money), and job platforms added reviews to theirs (because why not).
Today you could say: job boards are review platforms and review platforms are job boards.
So your reputation strategy should not only consider Glassdoor or its local competitors (like kununu in Germany), but Indeed and other job boards.
By the way, Indeed is owned by a Japanese company called Recruit, and that same company bought Glassdoor. Which makes it even more obvious how much those two aspects are intertwined.
2. Their business model is not reviews, but jobs and ads
It’s important to understand that review platforms (like job boards) get paid by employers, not by candidates. Companies are the customers, candidates are the product. Reviews are a hook, but jobs and ads are how they make money.
So being engaged on Indeed, Glassdoor, or others is not free. It costs money, and the more you want to do (and the more countries you want to do it in), the more it costs.
There are different packages with different levels of job posting, branding and user engagement. And invoices come obviously not as a one-time fee, but every year.
One more “hungry animal” in the employer branding budget.
The point here is, you can't usually have the review engagement without some kind of job or branding package. (German network Xing/kununu famously punishes companies that buy jobs but not review engagement this way: they put your competitor's jobs under your reviews.)
In return for buying, the platforms promise to help you recruit and build your employer brand, for example with banners and the possibility to reply to reviews.
So you will also need a way to measure the return on investment: KPI and analytics should be in place so you can decide over time which platforms and packages have proven effective and are worth it for you.
3. When you reply to a review, you don’t actually reply to the reviewer
But in reality, you reply to the hundreds or thousands of users who read the reviews.
So consider yourself in a public arena. Your audience is everyone.
And what happens when a candidate skims through ten or twenty of your reviews and your replies all sound the same?
It becomes obvious that you used copy + paste. Meaning, you don’t really listen. And that’s the message that sticks.
So it’s not very effective, PR-wise, to pay for premium access to a platform and then always use same boring boilerplates starting with “thank you, we value your opinion”. I wouldn't recommend it.
Which also goes to show that a good reputation management strategy needs more than money: time. Resources. Enough to read, understand and reply to reviews with helpful answers.
There is a lot more to say about review platforms, what candidates find the most important, how to boost your score (spoiler: there's no short cut), and what to learn from best practices. So stay tuned for more Doors this week, and some of this might come up...
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