The Watercooler

Employment Branding: How to Deal with a Bad Online Review

Billionaire investor Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

And if you’ve ever had a disgruntled applicant or employee leave you a scathing Glassdoor review, you understand exactly what he means.

Tips for Protecting Your Employment Brand Online

In an age where 84% of people trust online reviews as much as friends, negative comments can quickly and severely damage your employment brand – if you don’t take the following steps, that is:

Make sure you’re sending the right message.

  • In this earlier post, we share several tips for honing your brand to make sure it’s authentic, understood by everyone in your organization, and communicated consistently.

Look at your reviews.

  • Go to Glassdoor.com and read the reviews (especially the bad ones). Pay attention to patterns: are there themes to negative comments, or are they isolated incidents? Try to identify potential problems with your recruiting process, culture or other aspects of your employment brand.

Improve what you can.

  • Can you please every rejected applicant? Pay every employee a million-dollar salary? No; but making a few small improvements to your processes, communication policies or culture could have a big positive impact on candidate/employee satisfaction – and future reviews.

Proactively generate more positive reviews.

  • The best way to minimize the impact of a bad Glassdoor review is by offsetting it with 100 raving testimonials. Create and implement a process to systematically gather positive reviews, so that the occasional complainer’s comments are drowned out by feedback from happy employees and satisfied job seekers.

Candidates and employees are becoming more vocal than ever, and platforms like Glassdoor provide a digital megaphone to amplify their message. Use the tips in this post to protect your employment brand – and gain a sustainable edge in today’s competitive recruiting environment.

Improve Recruiting Results by Working with the Right Partner

No matter whom you’re trying to recruit, success in today’s tight employment market requires a broader range of sourcing tools. To ensure timely access to the people you need, partner with a national staffing firm like PrideStaff. Contact us today to learn more about our On Target fulfillment process.