The Ultimate Guide to Glassdoor Reviews

The Future Is Feedback: Why Reviews Matter

If you had to make a list of your most powerful tools as talent and people professionals, would employee reviews be on that list?

They should be. The best employer brands are built organically and authentically by people, not artificially through formal process or top-down by executives. That’s why it’s so important to build your employer brand organically – by treating your people well, ensuring a widespread feeling of belonging, and listening to and learning from real feedback in Glassdoor reviews. It’s only then that the genuine story about your workplace – told by the people who know it best – will serve to draw more great people, diverse perspectives and innovation to your company.

In our current age of interconnectedness, reviews are one of the most powerful ways to establish a clear employer brand. For employees, reviews offer the chance to be heard – to know their voices matter. And for employers, reviews offer an opportunity to look deep within the company culture and ensure that what’s actually happening and being experienced inside an organization is in line with what the company’s aspirations. This can impact the experience of both current employees and prospective ones.

Employee Reviews Benefit the Entire Organization

But there’s one big problem: reviews can be hard to wrangle.

The process of capturing employee feedback, interacting and making the most of it, and then squeezing out as many insightful observations as you can is a full-time job at best – and an impossible task at worst.

That’s why we built Glassdoor Review Intelligence™.

Glassdoor Review Intelligence™ expands the reach of Glassdoor’s simple review tools to allow employers to unlock insights from employee reviews and understand the “why” behind their ratings. Organizations can deploy this powerful sentiment analysis tool to Reach, Listen, and Influence employees, ultimately turning employee reviews into a competitive edge.

In this guide, we’ve pulled together our best content on using Glassdoor Reviews to build and manage an attractive employer brand. Use this guide to find out how Glassdoor’s Review Intelligence™ can help you build the online presence you need to be competitive in today’s hiring landscape:

Grow: Best Practices for Getting More Reviews

Unless an employee’s motivations are extremely positive or negative, regular and accurate reviews don’t happen by accident. Instead, strategic and highly reviewed companies put effort and intention into developing and implementing a review strategy. Especially if you’re new to Glassdoor, you’ll need to prioritize and focus your efforts on encouraging more reviews.

Here are five best practices top-reviewed companies on Glassdoor use to get as many accurate and unbiased employee experience reviews as possible:

• Start with new hires
  Enthusiastic new hires offer great insight into your organization because they have recently experienced the onboarding process. At Glassdoor, we ask new hires to leave reviews of their hiring experience during their first day of training, and then we ask them to follow up after they’ve been on the job for 90 days to update their review.
• Coach managers to ask for reviews
  Managers are a key resource to help encourage team members to leave reviews. Especially when a team is going through a round of hiring, managers can request reviews so potential applicants have up-to-date information about what their job would be like. You can make sure this stays top-of-mind for managers in your organization by setting an annual or twice-yearly calendar reminder for managers to reach out to their teams and request updated feedback.
• Leverage review request templates
  Ask for reviews using customizable email templates – available in your Employer Center – and shareable links to embed in any channel.
• Tap employee resource groups
  Members of ERGs tend to be highly engaged employees. Regularly check in with them to encourage reviews, and make sure they know about the Glassdoor feature that allows reviewers to weigh in with a rating specific to diversity & inclusion.
• Include requests for reviews during all performance meetings
  Make sure you’re inviting all employees to leave reviews on Glassdoor throughout the year, such as during or after a performance evaluation, or after a large project has wrapped up.
• Respond to reviews
  As responses come rolling in, make sure you’re responding to reviews in a timely manner. When employees see that other employees’ reviews are taken seriously, it encourages them to take the review process more seriously.

If the process of requesting employee reviews sounds overwhelming, don’t fret – you won’t have to manage it alone! You can sign up for a free Glassdoor Employer Profile and receive access to two key tools that will help you capture candid feedback about your employee experience:

Request Employee Reviews Easily and Measure Results

Email Request Templates

Access a collection of customizable email templates with shareable links to ask candidates for candid reviews on any platform – email, social media, and communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Campaign Analytics

Track review collection rates in one place to better understand campaign results and identify opportunities for improvement.

Listen: Best Practices for Monitoring Reviews

Once you have a steady flow of reviews coming into your Glassdoor Employer profile, your work isn’t done! The more reviews you have, the more time you need to spend keeping up with new reviews, responding to reviews, reporting issues that arise, and taking necessary action.

Are you worried about receiving a negative review? It’s natural to feel that way. However, we’ve found that even neutral or negative reviews can play a positive role in giving candidates an accurate view of an organization’s culture and employee experience.

Negative reviews in particular can give candidates a more well-rounded view of a company, allowing them to self-select out of the application process if it’s clear it will not be a good fit based on issues like working hours, expectations around working from home, or company culture.

Even when responding to a negative review, you are building up your organization’s reputation and presence as an employer that listens.

Here’s a look at the three most common ways you’ll need to spend your time when monitoring reviews and how to handle each of these situations in a thoughtful, effective manner:

Monitoring New Reviews

Identify one stakeholder who will be in charge of managing Glassdoor reviews so that your team is not disrupted by the large number of reviews that can come in on a monthly or quarterly basis. This is especially important in enterprise organizations. However, while this person is in charge of managing reviews – responding to them can still be a team sport!

Set up custom alerts on your Glassdoor Employer page to send you an email whenever new reviews are posted.

Take note of times when the frequency of reviews increase or decrease – are these cycles connected to anything?

You can also access all of your reviews and ratings by using Glassdoor’s comparison function across Glassdoor and Indeed.*

* Feature available with Glassdoor’s Enhanced Employer Profile

Responding to Reviews

No matter the content of the review, your first response should be to say “Thank you,” to the reviewer for taking the time to review the organization. Beyond your interaction with the reviewer, this will show the candidates reading your response that your organization is listening and cares about all kinds of feedback.

If you find it difficult to manage the large number of reviews you receive, create a more methodical approach. Aim to respond to 80-90% of reviews based on the urgency and gravity of the review.

Reporting Reviews

You can flag reviews that you believe do not meet our content standards and seek additional review for that content by our Content Moderation team.

Share: Best Practices for Showcasing Reviews

Showcasing employee-generated reviews will likely generate an additional influx of positive, recent reviews, which is exactly what applicants will look for when vetting your company. This will also move older negative reviews further down on your profile page.

It’s also worth noting that Glassdoor reviews allow you to harness the voice of your employees to tell an authentic story about your organization. It cuts through the corporate speak that often makes its way into official employer branding collateral designed to show prospective candidates what to expect when they apply for a job with your organization – and what to expect if they land that job.

Once you’ve invested time in gathering more reviews and feel confident that you’re managing the reviews well, it’s time to explore different ways to showcase them.

Here’s how some of the most active companies on Glassdoor get the most out of their employee reviews:

* Feature available with Glassdoor’s Enhanced Employer Profile
** Feature available with the Select Branding Bundle (Glassdoor Enhanced Profile Select + Indeed Company Pages Premium)

Understand: Best Practices for Analyzing Reviews

Data gleaned from reviews offers a strategic source of insights for HR leaders and decision makers. In addition to gaining insight into overall Glassdoor profile visits, your organization can also organize, review and analyze all review-related data in one place.

This has a wide range of applications for organizations seeking to better understand employee engagement and make more informed decisions around employee experience. For example, Expedia correlates the number of reviews it gets to the number of invitations for reviews that were sent and tracks trends in employee sentiment (positive vs negative), which are then compared to the employee survey. This helps Expedia spot any issues that they can take action on, as well as positive items they can highlight with candidates.

Here are a few more things you can do with a Glassdoor Employer profile to track and analyze employee satisfaction and sentiment:

• Ratings & Interview Trends
  With a free Glassdoor Employer Profile, your organization can quickly see ratings and interview trends over time and how those results correlate to changes within the company.
• Ratings Analytics
  Your organization can also break down ratings by job title and location to zero in on high- and low-performance areas.
• Keyword Analysis of Reviews*
  Generate easily scannable word clouds of your company’s “pros & cons” for employee and interview reviews.
• Review Intelligence™**
  Using Glassdoor’s Review Intelligence™ tool, you can use natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis to extract insights hidden in your reviews, saving your HR and employer branding team considerable time and energy.

* Feature available with Glassdoor’s Enhanced Employer Profile
** Feature available with the Select Branding Bundle (Glassdoor Enhanced Profile Select + Review Intelligence)

Take Action: Best Practices for Leveraging Review Intelligence™

A powerful sentiment analysis tool, Review Intelligence™ makes it much easier to analyze Glassdoor reviews and take the guesswork out of what your employees are saying about you.

Review Intelligence™ allows employers to unlock insights from employee reviews and understand the “why” behind their ratings, surfacing valuable patterns in feedback in order to better inform your employer brand strategy. Lengthy reviews are distilled into a clear sentiment “snapshot” so employers can discover what’s working, what’s not, why and where, all without having to parse through numerous reviews. Review Intelligence™ automatically surfaces insights hidden in employee reviews, enabling talent professionals to more effectively drive improvements to their employee experience.

• Surface what matters to employees and candidates. Our natural language processing (NLP) engine automatically sifts through your reviews to understand sentiment and transform it into high-level insights:
  • Detect and categorizes popular review topics
  • Identify which review topics need attention based on positive or negative sentiment
• Drill deep into the most common review topics. Easily identify bright spots and areas in need of immediate attention by digging deeper into various review topics including Management, Culture, Diversity & Inclusion to reveal hidden insights.
  • Pull and surfaces key quotes from new reviews
  • Break down sentiment and feedback by job function and country
• Share Reports to Inform Leadership. Bring insights and reporting to leadership to drive improvements in the employee experience. Share compelling executive summaries with leaders that will drive improvements in your employee experience:
  • Show key changes in sentiment over time
  • Compare your company’s sentiment to competitors and customizable industry benchmarks to inform your unique employer brand

Reputation Versus Reality: Using Reviews to Advance Your Organization’s Employer Branding

In our constantly connected digital world, your employee experience is your employer brand. Prospective candidates are using reviews to make decisions about the companies they interview with, and employees are using reviews as a benchmark for gauging how much their companies actually care about their needs. Make the most of your employees’ authentic voices by making the most of your reviews – accessing, interacting with, showcasing and analyzing them to better inform your employee experience decision making and choices.