What is Employer Reputation Management?

Employer reputation management develops your organization’s ability to attract and retain top talent: a key growth and success driver for any business.

A strong employer brand has increasingly become a key area of focus for organizations. Industry research by Glassdoor highlights the importance of employer reputation management:

• 75% of hiring decision-makers say it’s easier to attract talent when they know of or about your organization, specifically when it comes to your company’s name, product, and services. 
• 84% of job seekers say the brand reputation of a company as an employer of choice is important. 
• 83% of job seekers are likely to research company reviews and ratings when deciding on where to apply for a job.

Before we get into some of the best practices in employer reputation management, it is important to recognize the impact that employees have on corporate reputation.

Employees don’t just contribute to a company’s positive financial performance. By recognizing their significant role in managing corporate reputation, businesses can gain a sustainable competitive advantage and more effectively drive talent acquisition and retention.

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Employer Reputation Management: Keys to Success

With this in mind, let us examine your keys to success when it comes to employer reputation management. You’ll notice that all of these involve an executive commitment to become a more employee-centric organization.

Ask What You Can Do Better

Your employer branding efforts start with your ability to get to the heart of employer-employee conversations. Employees won’t always find it easy to be upfront with their managers and bosses so it’s critical that you ask relevant and insightful questions.

• “How can we make your work more fun?”
• “If you were in my shoes, what would you change, and why?”
• “What have you heard customers say about our business?”
• “If there’s one thing you could change about what we do here at work, what is it and why?”
• “How can I set you up for even greater success?”

By asking what you can do better, your employees feel that they’re being listened to, they have a stake in the success of the company, and their feedback is critical to the growth of the entire organization.

Monitor and Respond to Employee Reviews

Online reviews left by employees on websites like Glassdoor and Indeed can have a strong impact on your employer brand. As part of your employer brand monitoring efforts, it’s critical that you’re able to keep an eye on these reviews and respond when necessary.

By monitoring employee reviews, you can also determine whether or not your company is seen as a great place to work. You can also more accurately understand the perceptions that current and potential employees have of your organization.

Responding to employee reviews, meanwhile, supports your efforts to improve the overall employee experience. Your responsiveness should also affect your hiring and recruitment strategy. Candidates may feel an extra measure of reassurance once they see that you, as an employer, are active on employee review sites.

Correct Problems with Employee Experience

If your employer reputation has taken a hit, there wouldn’t be much to improve upon or manage if you don’t correct any critical problems with the employee experience.

Listen to employee feedback and act on the insights that you gain from that feedback. Don’t just pay lip service when you respond to reviews: resolve any high-impact issues that your employees may have raised.

Another reason for using employee feedback this way is to prepare your company for times when a candidate who has read your reviews might ask probing questions about the employee experience.

Encourage Employees to Become Ambassadors

Think of your employees as ambassadors who represent your organization to people outside the company’s walls. This makes them powerful potential ambassadors and authoritative and authentic communicators.

Consider a strategy in which you ask them to share their feedback on online review sites. It’s a great way to capture and understand the voice of your workforce.

Just remember not to set any requirement that the review should be positive. Besides, employees tend to feel more goodwill toward a company that wants them to be authentic and provides opportunities and platforms for them to share genuine feedback.

Developing a culture based on candid feedback sharing, transparency, and open communication can do wonders for your employer reputation.

Harness Employee Feedback

Not all employee feedback will be in the form of online reviews. Sometimes, you can capture them through survey forms, one-on-one consultations with the leadership team, interviews, regular performance reviews, or pieces of paper dropped in your office’s suggestion box.

Don’t let this valuable kind of information go to waste. Employee feedback can contain the kind of information and insights you need to build a strong employer brand reputation.

If you’re getting massive amounts of employee feedback, you may want to apply analytical techniques and technologies (like natural language processing) to find hidden patterns and trends in sentiment within your data.

For example, your HR team may discover that 99% of your Indeed reviews mention how incredible the organizational culture is. But close to 70% talk about how there’s room to improve the “benefits package” or your company’s “PTO policy.”

By taking an analytical approach to feedback, you can spot employee issues before they become full-blown employer reputation disasters, as well as discover positive features that you can highlight with top candidates.

Perfect Your Interview Process

Is your recruiter taking too long to return phone calls? Are your interviewers asking the right questions, or are they making a negative impact on your attractiveness as an employer? What factored into a candidate deciding not to accept the offer, when you thought for sure that she would?

Ask these questions and find ways to refine and perfect your interview process. Again, authentic employee and candidate feedback will come in handy. Listen to their comments. Then make the correct changes to your hiring process and deliver interview experiences that match potential employees’ expectations (as well as your own brand values).

Employer Reputation Management: Focus on Employee Experience

Employer reputation management is a must for organizations looking to attract top-quality applicants. By harnessing employee feedback, managing employee reviews, and making a commitment to provide a positive employee experience, companies can improve their employer reputation and build a solid foundation for their recruitment strategy.