Employer brand management is crucial to attracting and retaining both active and passive candidates to your company. Whether you’re currently looking to hire a new employee or will need to down the line, you have to ensure your company’s reputation online remains positive. Why? While you’re vetting candidates, they’re also vetting you online-through LinkedIn, Google, Glassdoor, and more. They’re reading up on comparable salaries and digging through both positive and negative reviews. So how can you make sure your reputation is positive across the endless social media channels and reviewing platforms out there? Here are five steps to successfully managing your company’s reputation in the digital age.
1. Consistently Keep a Positive Social Media Presence
It sounds cliché, but it’s true: you absolutely need a solid social media presence these days to maintain a positive company reputation. Beyond having a LinkedIn page, your company should have Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, too-and you should be keeping all of them up to date. Potential employees are looking at your social media-just like you might glance at theirs! – when evaluating whether or not they’d want to work for you. Highlight positive employee achievements, company milestones, fun events, and even every-day moments. All of these things go a long way in telling the story of your company and highlighting the positive aspects of your company culture.
2. Manage Reviewing Platforms
Sites like Glassdoor are a great way for candidates to get a sense of what it’s like to work somewhere. They can read about pros and cons of a workplace, what the culture is like, and what other people at the company typically make in terms of salary. It’s important to keep tabs on your Glassdoor page so you can respond to negative reviews. Let negative commenters know that you appreciate their feedback and respond with how that complaint has been remedied since they’ve left. Whether you agree with the comment or not, keep a calm and helpful tone. Your potential candidates want to see that you care about honest feedback and will make changes when necessary to make it a better place to work.
Add content to your company page on Glassdoor and other reviewing sites, including testimonials and information on your benefits and work culture. You can also ask current employees to leave reviews; while you want them to be honest, they’re likely to leave mostly positive feedback since they still work for you. Just be sure to not ask a large amount of current employees to do this at the same time-potential candidates will see that the reviews were posted closely to one another and that doesn’t look good for anyone.
Finally, be on the lookout for errant or bogus reviews. While not common, there are spammers and the like that will leave reviews for companies they have never worked for. Additionally, it is possible for someone to leave a review for your company simply by mistake. In these cases, you can ask that Glassdoor or others remove the review.
3. Be On The Lookout For New Review Platforms
When it comes to managing your company’s reputation online, it pays to be an early adopter to new reviewing platforms or social media channels. New platforms are popping up all the time, such as The Job Crowd or Great Place To Work and if you don’t pounce on them when they first debut, disgruntled employees may get the first say on what it’s like to work for your company. Get in on these new sites as they are developed so you can try and maintain control over your digital impression.
4. Give Your Employees A Healthy Work-Life Balance
Managing your company’s digital reputation starts with – you guessed it – what you actually do to make your organization a good place to work. Word of mouth travels fast these days and companies that don’t offer much work-life balance or encourage burn out become widely known as toxic work environments. Do your part to avoid this by encouraging your employees to use vacation time, maintain a healthy work-life balance, work from home occasionally, and take a mental health day when necessary. You want your employees to feel appreciated and cared for at work. Prioritizing their work-life balance goes a long way in keeping them happy – and preventing those unpleasant Glassdoor reviews they could potentially write when they leave. Plus, creating a company culture that people want to boast about inadvertently turns your employees into good brand ambassadors.
5. Hold Exit Interviews
One way to gauge what people like or don’t like about working for you is to hold thorough exit interviews when employees leave. You can ask them to submit a survey (if they’d rather not talk in person) about the reasons they’re leaving and what they would have changed about your work environment. This can help you understand what potential changes should be made so you can prevent additional turnover and create a more positive company culture, resulting in better online dialogue about your company.
Managing your company’s digital reputation is crucial to attracting and retaining your industry’s top talent. By taking the steps outlined above you can ensure your employees are content and you’ll have potential candidates lining up for that next open spot at your company.
