The Recruiting Trends Spring Conference covered a wide range of topics, including basic recruiting, talent acquisition leadership and employer branding.
Glassdoor’s Director of Product Marketing, Alison Hadden, presented on the importance of having a strong employer brand to recruit top talent. Afterwards, she sat down with Peter Clayton of TotalPicture Radio, to answer some commonly received questions about Glassdoor and employer branding.
If you’d like to listen to the full podcast, check it out here.
Peter: WHAT ARE JOB SEEKERS LOOKING FOR IN A COMPANY? WHAT MATTERS TO THEM?
Alison: We have more than 23 million job seekers in our community and surveying this group helps us understand some of the trends in job seeker and candidate behavior. What we’ve seen is that employer branding today matters more than it ever has before because of social media, the Internet and the pace of information that wasn’t really there a couple of years ago.
84% of job seekers would change jobs for a company with a better reputation and 69% would not take a job with a company with a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed.
So what’s happening with candidates today is they’re requiring a level of transparency and authenticity from employers that they’ve never really asked for in the past because the reputation of a company is really weighing and having a tremendous influence on a job seeker’s decision to take a job or not.
P: WHAT GENERATION CARES ABOUT TRANSPARENCY? MILLENNIALS? BABY BOOMERS? GEN X? GEN Y?
A: We’re seeing across industries, generations, regions and even globally, people starting to want to take place in the conversation and that idea of what is it really like to work somewhere, is really universal.
I believe that even some of the older generations are still looking for that transparency because one of the stats I mentioned this morning, 51% of new employees today say that they have buyer’s remorse.
P: HOW MANY JOB SEEKERS USE GLASSDOOR?
A: A company called Software Advice recently conducted a Google survey which indicated about 48% of job seekers are using Glassdoor at some point in their search.
P: WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF BEING A TRANSPARENT COMPANY?
A: I think the employers that are leaning into the conversation and really embracing this era of transparency are seeing the benefits in the form of right candidates and the candidates that are going to stay at the company from a retention standpoint.
P: WHAT CAN USERS POST ON GLASSDOOR?
A: We’ve got six million pieces of content that have been submitted by current and former employees across 300,000 companies worldwide. That content consists of everything from a CEO rating, a company rating, and our average company rating across the site is a 3.2 out of 5.0. So we’re seeing that most people are actually pretty satisfied with where they’re working.
Interview experiences and salary reports, can be posted anonymously so that people can get an idea of a range when they’re researching that company. You can also post photos to be posted on the profile.
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P: WHO SUBMITS CONTENT? EMPLOYEES?
A: Yes, employees submit content but so do interview candidates and former employees.. Facebook, for example, has iPads at the end of their interview process on-site. They hand them to candidates and they say, ‘we encourage you to go onto Glassdoor right now and post a very candid experience of what this process was like.’
So, we’re really going a level deeper. We started with just the review and the rating piece; now we’re getting into not just an overall company rating, but would you recommend the company to a friend? Do you believe that this company is going to have a more positive outlook moving forward, stay the same or it’s going to basically go down? Do you approve of the way the CEO is leading the company? We’re really going a level deeper too with things like work-life balance, the salary and compensation benefits so that we can then deliver to employers this fantastic data around how their company brand and their reputation stacks up against their talent competitors.
Glassdoor also showcases companies with high marks in all these categories. Some of our most popular lists include:
Top Companies for Compensation & Benefits
Top Companies for Career Opportunities
Top Companies for Work-Life Balance
Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions
P: ANYONE CAN SIGN UP FOR A FREE EMPLOYER ACCOUNT. HOW DO YOU VERIFY THAT PERSON IS ACTUALLY FROM THE COMPANY?
A: When a person signs up for a Free Employer Account, we verify the information they share with us including email addresses, titles, first & last name, and so on. We want to make sure it’s reasonable that this person would be in a position to speak on behalf of their company.
P: WHAT IF MULTIPLE PEOPLE AT MY COMPANY SIGNED UP FOR A FREE EMPLOYER ACCOUNT?
A: Let’s say I work at Shell. If I didn’t realize that Shell already has an employer account and I sign up for one, it’s going to merge the accounts. Then you have the opportunity to determine who from my team does what. Who can just view information, who can respond to reviews, who can edit some information, and who can Oversee the process.
P: HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHO GETS TO EDIT/WRITE COMPANY CONTENT?
A: There are different levels of permissions. Someone can be tagged as the content manager and they would have the ability to edit information but other people would just have access in order to monitor content.
P: HOW DO I GET MORE REVIEWS AND GET A BALANCED PERSPECTIVE?
A: We have a number of resources that are on our website. Visit www.glassdoor.com/employers and click on resources. You’ll find two fantastic eBooks on how to encourage reviews from your employees. We’ve also got a fantastic section that says How to Manage Reviews which will help get you started.
There’s even an email template that companies can send out in a way that says ‘we want more of you to tell your story.’ It’s not saying we want you to post good reviews here or we want to incentivize you because that’s not a best practice. But we want to be able to really share with people why this is a place they should work so that we can help vet out the people who are going to be the right fit.
