Today’s Recruiting Landscape

Job applicants are accessing more information about potential employers than ever before. Candidates can now, and carefully do, weigh in their options, comparing benefits and salary, and decide which opportunity and employer are right for them.

With more information, comes more power to choose. This represents an opportunity for companies who have proactively worked on their employer branding. For companies who ignore their employer branding, they could potentially face an employer reputation problem.

In today’s recruiting landscape, your company information is out there whether you want it to be or not. Whether true or not! If you aren’t actively managing your brand and reputation, someone else will write the story for you!

So what’s your immediate action plan for dealing with that less-than-stellar company reputation?

As you might guess, a weak, out-of-control employer reputation is a serious turn-off for job candidates researching your organization. If you aren’t actively responding to reviews and sharing your company’s message, chances are your candidates will not be informed and able to make a balanced decision to apply to your company. If your company has been reviewed unfairly, you may have options to have negative reviews removed. But if you try this by yourself, you will get no response. A reputation management company, can find compelling arguments and actively remove reviews for you.

Reputation management companies are also specialized in reducing the prominence of exposure to particularly bad reviews which damage your employer reputation.

Employer Reputation Management

A bad employer reputation reduces the pool of applicants and it also reduces the number of people who accept offers from your company. In fact, according to Glassdoor, 69% of applicants would not take a job from a company that has a poor employer reputation; even if the potential employee is not employed at the moment of the offer. This illustrates the realities of the hiring war in the current economy.

Today’s candidates use Glassdoor every step of the journey to educate themselves about companies. For example, a candidate receives an email about a job opportunity. They immediately search “working at company” or “salary at company”. Glassdoor likely comes up first in their search results. They can easily prepare for an interview, and compare benefits and salary after an offer is made.

This makes the labour market more tight, exerting monetary pressure on employers. All things being equal (implication on wages across the board) there is cost saving for companies with positive overall ratings and extra costs to those who have some bad employer reputation.

Cost of Bad Employer Reputation

The business case for hiring a reputation management company to help you control employer reputation can easily be showcased from a Deloitte Study which calculates savings to a company over a set of 30 hires. As can be seen on the graph above; companies can expect a 22% decrease in recruitment costs.

What does 22% represent over a set of 30 hires, according to an employer Branding Global Trends Study conducted in May of 2014: This is about $21,780. This is a significant amount of money and we believe for most small to medium sized companies we have solutions that can pay off in a matter of months. How do you know if you should be actively participating on managing your reputation based on current Glassdoor reviews? According to Glassdoor, a company that has less than 3.3 stars should be actively looking to into correcting things. But we believe that specific qualitative measures are also important. What if there is a particularly negative review? Some of these reviews overpower the good ones, some stain a company for years and even hurt the prospects of a company exit strategy as these are items are often found on due diligence lists.  Give us a call and let’s review your profile.

The ROI of reputation management is great, so don’t wait any longer. Call us today!