Glassdoor Reputation Management: Boost Employee Advocacy & Attract Customers

What is Glassdoor, and how does it work?

Glassdoor helps job seekers and businesses connect, but it’s quite a bit more than that. Workers can use the platform to connect with each other, have conversations about the workplace, and anonymously leave reviews about their current or former employers. Businesses can use the platform for reputation management by claiming and managing their profile, engaging with reviews, and shaping their brand narrative.

Business profiles can appear on the site in a few ways: Your current or former employees can add your business when they leave a review, or you can add your business profile by creating a free account. Glassdoor says they may also add a business profile when they think it benefits the community.

There are several audience segments who are active on Glassdoor, and each are important to understand as you utilize Glassdoor reputation management:

• Employers: Organizations like yours in need of talent. You can use the platform to compare the strength of your offers against those of your competitors, advertise a new position, pursue temporary or specialty talent, and more.
• Job candidates: People who are looking for a job — which includes both the employed and the unemployed. The employed use Glassdoor to weigh their current position against new options they’re considering.
• Recruiters: Professional headhunters who are looking to place candidates with specific firms or recruit new candidates.
• Customers: The people who pay for your products and services. They use Glassdoor to compare how you talk aspirationally about your brand vs. how your real-life employees talk about it.
• Competitors: The companies you compete with. For them, Glassdoor operates as a competitive intelligence tool that exposes key vulnerabilities in your business they can exploit.

Each of these audience segments approaches Glassdoor with its own goals and objectives. Your objective as a business is to engage effectively with all of them, since they all have an impact on your branding as an employer and the public’s perception of your business.

Setting the right expectations

Before you dive into Glassdoor reputation management, it’s important to understand the lay of the land. Glassdoor attracts many visitors, but it’s not quite as large as some of the other mainstream review platforms such as CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, and Monster, etc.

However, Glassdoor offers something that the others, so far, do not: the ability for employees to write reviews about their employers. Because these reviews are anonymous, many people are comfortable sharing juicy details about the company they work for — which can have a dramatic effect on the company’s reputation. 

For example, disgruntled employees are often quick to call out employers that:

• Don’t pay on time
• Offer lower-than-average pay
• Enable a toxic or dysfunctional work environment
• Have poor logistics, fulfillment, or training processes
• Deceive customers
• Attempt to game the system

If you’re in a hiring phase, interested candidates will want to know exactly what it’s like to work for you and if your current employees are happy or not. But if there’s an unresolved issue in your business, and your employees are complaining about it publicly, this can seed real doubt in someone who is considering applying for a job at your business — or taking your job offer.

Therefore, the true impact of Glassdoor reputation management comes from the trends your reviews reveal. These can point to necessary changes you should make to help you address real problems, improve your reputation, and be able to successfully attract, hire, and retain the best employees. 

We can connect the dots a bit further. Chances are pretty high that if you have happy employees, you also have happy customers. Conversely, if you have unhappy employees, their attitude can directly impact your customers’ happiness, too, by chipping away at the customer experience and therefore your bottom line.

The business goals you can achieve with Glassdoor

First, a quick distinction: With other review platforms, the primary focus is to generate traffic, leads, sales, and revenue. With Glassdoor, the priority is really about finding, attracting, and winning over the best talent, which makes it fundamentally about the relationships you have with your employees and the way you’re perceived in the marketplace.

Within that framework, here are some of the business goals you can strive for with your free profile and some diligent Glassdoor reputation management: 

• Quality job candidates: Glassdoor attracts a steady stream of informed and interested job candidates. With your profile and a strong portfolio of positive employee reviews, you can get in front of the type of candidates you need to help your business grow and succeed.
• Insight into employee sentiment: With Glassdoor, you can monitor your employee reviews and use rich analytics to gain a deeper understanding of how your employees feel. Then you can use what you learn to direct much-needed improvements to the employee experience. A better experience means more positive reviews which attracts more job seekers.
• A stronger brand narrative: Engaging in Glassdoor reputation management helps you tell a more complete and compelling story about your brand. You can include your mission statement, ratings, reviews, review responses, rewards, and other accolades that show job seekers why you’re a worthy business to work for.

If you pay for an enhanced profile and/or advertising options, you can check a few more goals off your list, including optimized messaging, targeted advertising, and sponsored job openings. 

If that all sounds good, you’ll need to start by claiming your employer profile on the platform, which we’ll talk about next.

How to claim your Glassdoor employer profile

Claiming your free employer profile on Glassdoor is simple and straightforward. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Go to glassdoor.com/employers and click “Get Started” or “Join Glassdoor.”
2. Fill out the form, including the number of open jobs you currently have, then click “Create Account.”
3. Next, tell Glassdoor a bit more about your company.
4. Glassdoor’s Trust & Safety team will verify your information.
5. Once you’re verified, it can take up to 3 business days for your business listing to appear on the site.

With your profile in place, you can start engaging in Glassdoor reputation management by monitoring and replying to reviews.

Glassdoor rules and regulations

As you use Glassdoor, it’s important to adhere to the platform’s community guidelines — which apply to all users of the platform, regardless of audience or the type of service utilized.

Here’s a summary of what the platform prohibits:

• Abuse, including targeted abuse of individuals, unwanted sexual content, insults, and content that is otherwise hateful
• Threats, including incitement of violence, glorification of violence, and wishes to harm
• Slurs or offensive stereotypes
• Misinformation
• Trolling
• Revealing the identity of others without their permission or revealing personal or confidential information about others
• Impersonation
• Proprietary information, including non-public internal company information such as merger and acquisition information, source code, customer lists, R&D activities, and financial information
• Spam, including any content meant as an advertisement and contextually irrelevant product or service content
• Copyrighted photos that you don’t own

For employers who want to respond to employee reviews as part of their Glassdoor reputation management strategy, here are a few other practices that are prohibited:

• Incentivizing or coercing employees to leave a review
• Including the name of the individual who you believe wrote the review
• Threatening the reviewer with legal or punitive damage

Failure to meet the content guidelines and follow the rules can result in flagged or removed content and temporary or permanent suspension of your account, among other consequences.

How to get Glassdoor reviews

What your employees say about you matters — which is why investing time in employee advocacy is such a worthwhile endeavor. One important way is to build up your Glassdoor review portfolio. 

The good news is that the platform encourages employers to request reviews and makes it easy to send review requests from your employer profile. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Employer Center.
2. Click “Community Reviews” and then “Request More Reviews.”
3. Select Customized Emails or Shareable Link.
4. If you select Customized Emails, then:
   1. Enter a Campaign Name.
   2. Select the review type from the dropdown menu.
   3. Enter the email address (or distribution list) of the employee(s) you want to request the review from. Note that you can only add 1,000 emails at a time.
   4. Select the email template you want to use, then enter a subject for the email and the email address you want to send the request from.
   5. Review the message of the email and click “Preview & Test email” to see what the recipient(s) will receive.
   6. Click “Send emails.”
5. If you select Shareable Link, then:
   1. Enter a Campaign Name.
   2. Select the review type from the dropdown menu.
   3. Click “Generate Link” and then “Copy.”
   4. Click “Done” and paste the shareable link URL into your preferred method of requesting reviews.  

When you request reviews as part of Glassdoor reputation management, here are some best practices:

• Request reviews from all your employees to avoid any suggestion of bias.
• Notify your employees ahead of time that you’ll be asking them to share their feedback on Glassdoor. Giving them a heads up reduces suspicion when the request shows up in their email.
• Clarify that reviews are voluntary and anonymous, and that you won’t know who writes what. This puts to rest any worries that you expect a positive review only, or that being honest will put someone’s job at risk.
• Make your employee review requests impersonal and even generic. Contrary to the review requests you might send to your customers, personalization matters far less in this case.
• Give your employees some prompts to get them started. This could be as simple as having them answer a few simple questions, or giving examples of the types of details they can include in their review.  
• Follow up and remind your employees to leave a review if they haven’t done so.
• However, don’t ask individual employees if they’ve left a review or not. This is a big no-no and violates Glassdoor’s policies.

• Also, don’t ask newly hired employees to write a review. Glassdoor recommends waiting until the 90-day mark or one-year anniversary to give them time to fully acclimate to your business and their role.

How to use your Glassdoor reviews for marketing and advertising

With Glassdoor reputation management, the idea is that you’ll accumulate a quality body of employee reviews that you can leverage to enhance your employer brand and further promote your business on the platform. 

One way to leverage your reviews is with Glassdoor’s free program called OpenCompany, which recognizes employers who embrace workplace transparency. Participating businesses get an OpenCompany badge on their profile that signals to others their commitment to a culture of transparency.

If you’re interested in participating, you need to do the following within 12 months:

1. Validate that your company profile is up to date.
2. Add 5-10 photos, depending on your company size.
3. Get 5-60 reviews from current employees, depending on your company size.
4. Respond to 2-10 reviews, depending on your company size. 
5. Include a link on your website or social media to your Glassdoor profile.

OpenCompany is an excellent way to get marketing mileage out of your Glassdoor review portfolio. And if you need further convincing, according to Glassdoor research, job candidates are 75% more likely to apply if a business actively manages its employer brand. 

If you pay for an enhanced profile, you can also feature positive employee reviews on your profile that truly embody your brand and highlight why you’re a great employer. 

Glassdoor is a key brand reputation tool

Your Glassdoor reviews and profile are monitored and analyzed by a variety of audiences, so knowing what your employees are saying about your business can help you improve and shape your employer brand the way you see fit. 

With Glassdoor reputation management, you have the tools and resources you need to attract, retain, and convert the right people — whether you’re courting quality job candidates, making the case for potential customers, or garnering other kinds of support in the marketplace.

By striving to create a great employee experience, ensuring competitive and ethical business practices, and leaning into employee advocacy, you can build and maintain a great reputation — and draw top talent to your team as a result.

To learn how GatherUp’s reputation management platform can support your insurance business, request a consultation with one of our reputation experts today.