Okay, I get it you know who Glassdoor is.  They’re that site where employees go to complain about how crappy a company is, right!?  Well, maybe Glassdoor of about 5 years ago.  In the past five years Glassdoor has built itself into one of the best Employer Branding tools on the market!

How so?

Glassdoor did what LinkedIn did in a way, but opposite. LinkedIn tricked employers into thinking it was great to have your employees all get this one site and upload their resume profile and call it “professional networking”. Oh! You got us, LinkedIn. That’s really going to hurt when all of our employees get recruited! I give LI full credit. They did something no other HR/Talent vendor has ever been able to do. Monster, CareerBuilder and Dice all wish they could have did what LI did.

Glassdoor opened up their site and let everyone and anyone comment on your work environment, and we thought ‘how evil!’. Why would a company let our disgruntled employees tell their story? Ugh! But, low and behold, the longtail prevails and we find out that Glassdoor actually gave us a way to respond to those few who are disgruntled and show people what your true brand is all about, in a way that is transparent and fresh – aka the Tripadvisor of Employers!

LinkedIn? They became a job board.  Funny how tables get turned.

Glassdoor just launched its newly designed Employer Center, which is basically a dashboard for Employers to manage and monitor their Glassdoor presence (i.e., your Employment Brand).  Most of what is in the Employer Center is actually free and any employer can claim theirs by just signing up. Interesting that Glassdoor has over 400,000 companies indexed, but only about 10% have actually claimed their brand! 90% of Employers have no idea and/or control of their Brand on Glassdoor and it’s free!

In the Employer Center Glassdoor gives you the tools to post jobs, run your own companies content stream, look a ton of various analytics and review and manage your Glassdoor user responses, all in one place. The new Employer Center also allows you to grant additional access to others in your organization. Let Marketing upload new content and look at analytics, allow operations to respond to a user response, etc.

5 Things I Really Like About Glassdoor for Employers: 

1. There’s a ton of just free stuff Glassdoor gives you to use and monitor that you’re silly for not taking advantage of, but one paid thing that I LOVE is your ability to post your jobs on your competitors page (if they are not a paid Glassdoor client -which most aren’t). People going to look at their page, many of them candidates, will see your jobs instead!

2. Candidate Activity stats. Glassdoor’s analytics show you which competitor jobs candidates are clicking. This allows you to do some very specific sourcing, and also see some possible candidates pools you weren’t aware of.

3. User Review Management. From the employer center you can now in one place read user reviews and respond, but you can also ‘feature’ one review that will be shown at the top of all reviews on your page. Basically, you can pick which of your reviews you want to feature. This is a paid service, but one I think is worth the ROI as it’s the first impression all candidates will read.

4. Running your own content stream on your Glassdoor page (free service). Glassdoor allows you place employment branding updates on your page and set up a live stream so that anytime something new is posted, it automatically shows up on your Glassdoor employer page.

5. Analytics. Some paid, some free.  Total activity and compare to competitors, candidate demographics, Rating and Interview trends, ratings by locations, competitor analysis, etc.  I can’t even tell you how robust the analytics are!  This alone is worth the demo.

I’m a big fan of what Glassdoor is doing and how they’ve evolved over the years.  If you haven’t checked them out lately, you need to. If  you haven’t claimed your free employer page, you’re an idiot. If you think you don’t have a brand, you’re wrong, you’re just not controlling it!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.