I was recently talking to a client about channels that are commonly included in the average organisation’s talent brand activation strategy.  During this conversation employee review site, Glassdoor.com, came up. My client asked me, “What do you think of Glassdoor?”

I’ll spare you the details of my response and get to the truth…

Love them or hate them, Glassdoor, and other employee review sites like it, can’t be ignored. If you have a vested interest in optimising talent attraction, advocacy and/or retention potential for your organisation, you need to engage with these digital platforms on an ongoing basis.

Research shows that well over half (at least 61%) of all candidates will consume content from an organisation’s profile on Glassdoor, and a significant number of employees will use the channel as a means to have their grievances known. If you think about how much influence digital platforms like Yelp and Angie’s List have on consumer choices and loyalty, it makes total sense.

You don’t have to love the truth, but if you work for a mid-size or enterprise-level organisation and want to mitigate damage while influencing positive perceptions of your brand, you have to respond. Simply put, your brand is on there and virtually screaming to be managed.

So, what about those darn negative reviews? We get a lot of questions about if to engage, when to engage and how to engage from our clients. Here are five tips to help shape your approach based on past experiences watching things go REALLY right and, well, not so right.

(The following tips assume that you have already done the basics like claimed your Glassdoor employer account and populated your organisation profile page with strong branded content).

Identify your “Triple R” – Review response resource

Responding to reviews on Glassdoor or any social media site is not a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing commitment that requires one or more dedicated resources and intentional time allotment. The good news is you can get a little creative on how to resource this need.

The obvious choice is to assign it to a member of your internal talent brand team (if you have one) or even a small team of executives if they are up for it. However, if neither of those options are viable for you, an alternative might be to enlist help from the team that is currently managing social responses on your other corporate or consumer brand channels. This approach works really well for the recruitment marketing team at Philips. It does require ongoing training and improvement dialogues to ensure the responses are relevant to the space and aligned with your Employee Value Proposition, (and a small cross-charged fee is paid for the service), but it keeps the senior team members focused on strategic “offense” vs. tactical “defense”.

My advice is to avoid giving the execution of this work to an external agency or distant third party. They are often not able to grasp your brand values as strongly as an internal team member, and they are more removed from the heat of the situation. These reviews are the voices of real people having real experiences in one of the most important areas of their life. The responder must be close enough to the fire to really care. And reviewers receiving your response will smell (and be disappointed by) an outsourced operation right away. (There could be a role for an external partner when developing the strategy and a social response playbook, however.)

Establish your response cycle
Once you’ve identified who will be managing the reviews, you’ll need to identify when they will engage. Exact schedules will vary based on factors such as volume of reviews, availability of the resource you’ve identified in Step 1 and alignment with any internal reporting cycles, but it’s good to be consistent.

Typically, the volume of new reviews is such that the task can be managed in a 30-minute time slot twice per week. If you have the resources to do it daily, even better! However, unlike other social media channels that have come to demand instant responses, the bar is still relatively low for Glassdoor reviews. Many employees are impressed to just get a response, so are completely fine with it coming two or three days after the initial post.

Align your brand elements

While the nature of your responses should never be forced, contrived or self-centered,

the opportunity to engage in a career conversation with someone who has already started is a great opportunity to personify your employer brand in real-time.

To take advantage of this opportunity, make sure the resource(s) you’ve identified in Step 1 are fully up to speed on your:

• Employee Value Proposition: What it is, positioning statement, core message themes or pillars
  
  
• Brand tone/personality: What it is, key words or phrases, and good vs. bad written examples in other brand communications, or example responses to reviews
  
  
• Organisation values: What they are, examples of how to craft messages that demonstrate them in action.
  

Using the above 3 elements to inform the sentiment of your Glassdoor responses will solidify your identity as an employer over time, not just in what you say but by what you do. The majority of job seekers review at least six reviews before forming an opinion of your organisation, so consistency and repetition is key to generating a clear, lasting impression for your target audience.

All the above should ideally be captured in a Social Response Playbook, which can be used as a reference by your Triple R and ensure consistency if it changes.

Avoid the No-No zones

The first No-No when it comes to responding to negative posts on employee review sites is negating the validity of the review. That’s right, nothing is more frustrating than telling someone they have upset you and their response being to tell you that they haven’t. Plain and simple, you don’t get to tell someone else how they feel, at work or in other parts of life. Focus your energy on responding to the intention of the review, in line with Step 3; not nitpicking the actual words or scenario being described.

The second thing to avoid is saying anything that is illegal (or even questionably so). Avoiding blatant discrimination should be a no-brainer, but make sure whoever is responding is continually aware of the latest labour laws, particularly in countries where Works Council or Equal Employment Opportunity laws apply.

100% canned responses are never a good idea. Readers feel the inauthenticity in them. Editable templates can be useful, however, in situations where the volume of reviews is high and resources are low, as long as the resources that are using them are thoughtful about their edits prior to posting. Your final response should still feel like it is communicating with the reviewer instead of launching a generic response from your brand.

Lastly, avoid promising something you can’t or won’t deliver on. Currently on Glassdoor, you get one chance to respond to each post and then the conversation is over. This is helpful to those managing the account from a workload perspective, but it can open the door for some practices that are questionable in integrity. Even if the employee or candidate can’t respond or follow up on the content in your post, it’s still good practice to be authentic in your responses. You can’t guarantee that there will never be another layoff in the organisation, and you shouldn’t commit to improving health benefits if that’s not on the HR agenda.

When in doubt, stick to a simple 3-step formula:

• Appreciate – genuinely thank the reviewer for taking the time to give feedback.
  “Thank you so much for taking the time to share this feedback with us about your experience working at Organisation X.”
  
• Reflect – mirror back what you have understood, filling in what they may have felt but did not say explicitly. This extension of empathy has a big impact on the outcome of your efforts.
  “We’re so happy to hear that you met many lifelong friends during your 10 years of service! It seems you were not quite as happy with the work-life balance during some of the time you were employed. That must have been hard for you and your family.”
  
• Share intentions – share (at a high level) how the information is being used to inform well intended continuous improvement efforts over time. As per Step 3, be sure to link this part of your response to your EVP themes when possible.
  “We believe that helping our employees manage their responsibilities both in and out of work with more ease is important. As such, will be including your feedback anonymously in our communications with HR leadership this month in a focused effort to drive continuous improvement in this area.” 

Analyse and take action
Having someone read and respond to all Glassdoor reviews (nice ones too, by the way!) is a great way to deliver a positive experience to the people who have taken the time to give feedback to your organisation. However, it is also a great way to keep a pulse on the strength of your talent brand, and influence positive change in your organisation, at little to no cost. 

The best social response programs have a way to synthesise detailed feedback from Glassdoor and/or other social platforms into a strategic report that gives management the honest insights they need to take action on improvement areas, and (more) heavily promote attributes that are clear strengths. This is usually done most effectively on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on the internal meeting cadence and preference of the most senior level stakeholder involved (i.e. CHRO). 

After all, a work experience is the “product” being delivered by the organisation, and we’re in a hyper-crowded marketplace where everyone is clamouring to differentiate a similar product the same time. The organisations and teams who will succeed are those who adopt a design thinking-inspired feedback and response management system that helps them to engage with talent as “customers” effectively, and then harness that engagement to improve the quality of their “product” over time.

Lisa Colella is the Founder & Chief Strategist for Truist, a boutique Talent Brand strategy, coaching and advisory firm whose mission is to help companies and people experience their true potential in both numbers and spirit. As an award-winning Recruitment Marketing practitioner, consultant and thought leader, she has helped many mid to enterprise level companies transform their top talent attraction and retention capabilities. She also enjoys coaching individuals who aspire to start or advance their careers in this ever-growing profession. For focused strategy, consulting, or advisory services related to the topic of this article contact Lisa at lcolella@wearetruist.com.

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Your talent competitors are not necessarily your market competitors. In fact, your talent competitors might not even be who you think they are.

In The Talent Cast podcast, James Ellis explains how to identify your talent competitors.

“How many people think they’re competing with Google or Facebook for talent? You’re nuts, but you’re not alone. So many companies consider Google, Facebook and Amazon as competition for talent, but miss their real competition. Let’s think through the question of who your real competition is so you can evaluate your own employer brand better.”

From a consumer standpoint, there are no market competitors for Amazon and Google. They are simply too large. So, to think you’re trying to attract developers to your small startup who are also considering Amazon and Google is simply incorrect.

“If I ask you where you want to go on vacation, you tell me you only know that you want to go to a beach. But do you want to go to Mexico, Puerto Rico, the South of France, or Greece? What about Iceland? They have beaches too, but they’re chillier. Your experience will be different. Technically Antarctica has a beach too (a place where land meets water), so why aren’t you including there too? You end up talking about many different places, none of which will give you the same experience.”

Ellis uses this metaphor to explain that not all your potential talent is the same! A startup competing for developers against Google is the same way Iceland and Port of Aratu compete for beach-goers. They’re radically different.

“Only when you embrace and understand this can you start to have a better idea about who your talent competitors truly are.”

If your organisation is a startup, your talent market includes people who are interested in working for a startup, as startups are different and special.

Big organisations are radically different from smaller organisations because of their size. People choose to work there because they offer what big organisations can: stability, structure, scale, and the potential for impact, including the need to navigate things such as politics.

People who want to work for a small organisation choose to do so for different reasons.

“Small organisations are radically different. Everybody knows everybody, everyone wears different hats and tries different things. Small organisations leverage the most from each individual. If you can increase the value of one person by 1% you can really see that. It’s not something you necessarily notice at a big company.”

The more you consider who your competitors are, the more you can truly understand and create a strong employer brand. You need to think about it with maturity to truly understand why people want to work for you.

“You are so different and what you offer is so different. There is a litany of organisations who are in a similar position as you, with similar reasons for existing and brand promises. Those organisations are your competition.”

For example, there’s no reason that the Red Cross couldn’t hire people from Amazon. But they’re not talent competitors. These organisations don’t compete for the same people in any way, shape, or form. Understand who your competition is by understanding where your best people might work.  

So how do you find out who your talent competitors actually are?

“Find a company whose motivations and brand promises are similar to yours, and how you compete in that industry, not [necessarily] because you’re the same size or you’re in the same geographic location, but because you’re motivated by the same things. Because those people are motivated by the same things. Your job in building a strong employer brand is to ask: “how do I overperform in this space compared to others?”

For example, if there is a similar company to you based in a similar location, and you’re both motivated by empowerment and innovation, you’re both essentially targeting talent who are inspired by the same things.

Understanding who your talent competitors are means, “knowing who you are, who is attracted to you, and where those people are. It’s understanding what other companies have similar motivations to you. Understanding your motivation and comparing that to other organisation is how you should be comparing yourself when you look at your employer brand and understanding how you stack up.”

“Understanding who your competitive set is beyond industry, scale or size, geography. It’s about your organisation’s motivation more than anything else.”

Assess your competition by understanding their employee value proposition (EVP), what they’re doing in the marketplace in terms of their careers site, social channels, and recruitment advertisements. Then find a way to differentiate yourself and amplify your message.

By understanding who your talent competitors are, you’ll be able to create a more compelling pitch!

Have you done a talent competitor analysis? Let us know in the comments.

Sources

Who is your competition?

James Ellis

The Talent Cast

The post Do you know who your talent competitors are? appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

HR departments can be slow and deliberate in order to make the right decisions; however, this can result in negative organisational impacts.

In explaining this concept, TLNT compares the cost of escalating damages from organisational inaction to postponing repair costs in your home. By ignoring or delaying the repair of a leaking pipe, what could have taken a few hundred dollars to fix can become thousands of dollars of damage when the pipe bursts and floods a whole floor.

Dr John Sullivan reporting for TLNT states:

It’s important for HR leaders to work closely with the CFO’s office to calculate the actual costs associated with inaction or unnecessary delays in strategic HR areas. The first step for everyone involved is to understand why doing nothing costs so much.

Damages and costs can escalate quickly. Recruitment marketing begins with attracting the best people. Organisations that make ordinary hires can unintentionally change company culture for the worse over time. Hiring weak managers can lead to the hire of weak employees. Once this takes hold, it can be extraordinarily difficult to reverse. If a talent problem persists over years, it can cause year-on-year expense damages. You also run the risk of falling behind competitors and project delays resulting in delayed revenue.

Another unforeseen expense is the cost of turnover from jobs not meeting candidate expectations, or not matching your employer brand to the employee experience.

Taking emergency action after a talent problem becomes evident can lead to errors. It can also be expensive if you need to rely on external specialists to help correct the problem. Even then, action taken after this point may no longer be effective, no matter how much you spend.

In order to address the problem of inaction, solutions include: investigating matters without delay, retention initiatives, training, leadership development, incentives, better internal movement, purchasing new technology, addressing weak productivity, and effective recruitment marketing to attract and hire top talent.

Preventative action, such as replacing poor managers, is by far the best defence against this problem. These measures can produce better results in the short term and can be more cost-effective in the long term.

Has your organisation engaged in talent loss prevention strategies? Let us know in the comments below.

Source

Understanding The Tremendous Cost Of “Doing Nothing” in HR

Dr John Sullivan

TLNT

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