It was my first year as an account manager at Glassdoor and I sat down with the chief human resources officer at a well-known, ~2,500 person tech company on the East Coast. They were already promoting their brand on Glassdoor and I was there to talk about posting their jobs, since Glassdoor is the top platform to engage talent. They were looking for engineers, whom we could target, so my goal was to help build their pipeline of quality tech talent.
After talking through traffic numbers for engineers on Glassdoor and how we would target them, we talked about reputation. In an ideal scenario, talent would be dying to work for them. But like many companies, they had some critical reviews.
Read: The HR Innovator’s Guide to Company Culture
My client wanted to know what the root cause might be. The CEO had resigned, and there was a small layoff in a specific department, but it was too late — those comments were live on Glassdoor and would influence candidates moving forward.
At Glassdoor, I often met with companies who had waited too long to engage their audience — recruits and current employees. Your employees are going to share your story and tell their friends and peers that they love or hate their jobs, and employee referrals are typically the best source of hire from a cost and cultural fit. So why aren’t companies spending more time on them?
After diving deeper into the negative reviews, we identified a common theme: poor career development.
After diving deeper into the negative reviews, we identified a common theme: poor career development. Glassdoor gives companies a variety of resources to improve their brand, with tips including maintaining hiring standards to show people matter, sending surveys so people feel heard, presenting career opportunities so people can grow and making people feel appreciated with regular performance feedback.
Here are the tips I found to be most helpful for companies looking to improve their brand on Glassdoor:
- Treat your people well
- Value their contribution
- Make sure they are getting something out of the employer-employee relationship
- Help them grow
But even after we talked about the ways she could engage current employees, she wanted to know one more thing: “What could we have done differently … so it doesn’t happen again?”
What could we have done differently … so it doesn’t happen again?
This was a common conversation I had with companies who had grown past 500 employees and were scrambling to correct the problem. I wanted to do more, so toward the end of 2015, I started opening up my eyes to new opportunities that could help companies address this problem earlier. I wanted to help companies make an impact with their employees before the employees became disenfranchised and wrote a bad review on Glassdoor. This is where I found Reflektive.
At Reflektive, we make a solution for companies to better develop and grow employees by offering a tool for continuous, real-time feedback and a more effective performance review process. The result is fewer employees leaving for new opportunities over concerns with career growth, and with that, more positive employee reviews — because their needs are being addressed.
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By having continuous conversations with employees about their development, managers can now be more effective in identifying areas for improvement and growth, while giving the recognition that employees now crave. Having a tool to document these conversations helps keep all parties on track and also provides several data points that can be used in the quarterly, semi-annual or annual performance review. Now, instead of having a performance review that has the “what have you done for me lately” feel to it, the review can be more developmental and inclusive of all feedback and recognition throughout the year. No longer will employees feel like a performance review is for HR, but now they will feel like it is something to help them succeed.
Now when speaking with people in HR, we talk about how to head up any problems or issues that may come with fast growth, and how we can address reputation issues before they arise.
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