Four Easy Tips for Managing Your Glassdoor Profile

June 15, 2022

Building a robust Glassdoor profile can go far in helping a company spread the word about its great workplace culture. A thoughtful Glassdoor profile showcases an organization’s employer value proposition to the key talent it wants to attract with its recruiting efforts.

As with all successful communications and culture building, a multifaceted, holistic approach is often the way to developing what your profile says about your team and company culture. You’ll want to consider what the main themes of your page will be (work-life balance, DEI, recruiting experience, employee resource groups, etc.), and make sure that you have clear, specific messaging for the company philosophy in those areas. Once established, you can invite employees and job candidates to provide comments and feedback on specific areas, as well as the company in its entirety.

If your company is considering starting a Glassdoor profile, or if you have one established but are looking to reengage, here are four tips for improving your Glassdoor interaction and management:

1. Positive or negative, always say thank you.

If an employee or candidate has taken the time to write a nice comment, always follow up with a thank you. It can be quick and prewritten (indeed, if your commenting volume is large that’s recommended with small customizations), but it goes a long way to acknowledge the time taken to say something positive about your organization. Conversely, it’s normal to have a negative reaction when we hear the uncomfortable stuff and the temptation is to not respond. But for an organization to grow and learn (and show externally that it’s growing and learning), it’s necessary to take the time and respond to negative comments thoughtfully and considerately. Show appreciation for the posts that aren’t good news but offer tangible criticism – they can serve as an opportunity to optimize an area of your employee experience that you might not have been aware of.

2. Provide another avenue.

Always look to take very negative reviews offline when you can. Publicly address that the comment has been seen and invite the reviewer to expand their concerns in a safe forum. For example, if harassment or discrimination is indicated, politely ask the person to provide more information via an anonymous ethics email address. Or, if they’d prefer, they can be provided an anonymous form fill that is sent to the HR team for logging and review.

3. Respond to a healthy mix of at least eight posts a month – two a week.

Consider a fifty-fifty response split to positive and negative comments to show you’re actively listening. Try to do this twice a week. By doing so, you’re signaling that you’re attentive to not just the positive feedback, but you’re also actively addressing issues. Responding to both positive and negative reviews with a regular cadence has the double effect of encouraging positive reviews through acknowledgment while discouraging abusive commenting if candidates and/or employees know you’re diligently managing your page.

4. Make the positive reviews a searchable rally cry.

Everyone loves to hear the positive news! So don’t let that great feedback get lost in the routine comments. When responding, create more excitement with a hashtag that could grow legs of its own, like #kuddoscallout. Or consider creating a custom hashtag that your employees know they can end their responses to great reviews with, for example, #inspiredatcompanyx or #companylife.

As with all external social channels, make sure that you have someone (or a team) specifically assigned to respond quickly and efficiently. It will help make clear who is responsible for the routine tactical Glassdoor communication needs as well as triage correspondence. Additionally, make sure to assign a person to pull your profile analytics and that they regularly send insight metrics including who your engaged audience is, if recruits are applying via Indeed (Glassdoor and Indeed have an active partnership to streamline the application process for candidates) and what jobs are receiving the most opens.

While these four tips will help you manage your Glassdoor profile for external recognition, now more than ever, Glassdoor and other competitive platforms should be channeled for internal engagement. Earning awards such as the Glassdoor Best Place to Work badge has been shown to help bolster internal engagement and retention while providing a morale boost to current employees. Organic, grassroots employee sentiment is almost always shared by employees to employees in other organizations. Word of mouth remains the strongest influencer of sentiment in any form, including how potential candidates feel about your company.

Smart Glassdoor management, including these four tips, can help make your employees feel great about where they work and candidates feel excited to join your team.


Contributors:

Tara Davis ROI Internal Communication Agency Employee.
Tara Davis

Director

Tara has a contagious spirit of possibility that makes things happen. She has been advising clients for over two decades, excelling in employee engagement, corporate social responsibility, and crisis communications. She's the kind of person who can turn a tragedy into a triumph, organizing a 5k that raised enough money to send 1000 children with muscle disease to camp.