5 tips to turn negative Glassdoor reviews into positive brand experiences

Part of your employer brand strategy should include responding to current and past employee reviews on Glassdoor! Negative reviews are an inevitable part of business. Do you know how to turn these into successes? Award-winning recruitment marketing consultant and thought leader Lisa Colella shares how. 

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.