Okay, I know Glassdoor has worked for a decade to make you believe that your employer reputation matters. Their own data says that 70% of candidates will check a companies reputation before making a career decision, and they have 40+ million candidates going to their site on a monthly basis.

The problem is, I don’t think most employers really thought that much about it, honestly.

Quick question: Have you gone out and claimed your company’s Glassdoor profile? 

I always like to ask that question when speaking to HR and TA leaders and it’s not too surprising to find most of the leaders in the room, over 50%, have not, or did, but have no real interaction with the site. If your employer reputation was that critical of a decision point for candidates, 99% of leaders would be on top of this and active in protecting their employer reputation online.

Glassdoor, like most great HR and TA technology platforms, does some things really well. The first thing they had to do was create a problem we didn’t know we had! Welcome to your employer reputation! OMG! I didn’t even know that was a thing until someone made it my thing! It’s actually great marketing!

Want to sell more airline flight insurance? Share a ton of stories about people dying in plane crashes! Sure you have a better chance of dying from a shark attack while simultaneously being hit by lightning, but hey, you never know when it’s going to your turn!

I think that is until recently. With the launch of Google for Jobs, your employer reputation might actually begin to matter for real this time! 73% of all job searches in the world, start on Google. The majority of the other searches probably go directly to Indeed or directly to your corporate career site, because we’ve trained people that “Indeed” is where they’ll find all jobs.

Google for Jobs is changing how job seekers are searching for jobs by basically keeping them on Google and not sending them to other sites. The other piece that Google for Jobs is doing is looking at the job search behavior, not from an employer perspective, which was done by every other company before it (because as it turns out employers pay money for this kind of stuff), but from the candidate perspective.

Google doesn’t really care how you want to make candidates jump through hoops and give them half-information about your jobs and company. Google is on the candidate side of the equation trying to disrupt. One way Google will disrupt the job search is by placing importance on your company’s reputation when it comes to job search results.

If your company’s reputation sucks, your jobs will show up lower in the Google for Jobs search results. This will be a killer to many organizations who haven’t managed their company’s reputation at sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, Google itself has tons of employer reviews (and will be getting a lot more!), plus at least a dozen other sites that track employee and past employee reviews as well.

So, what should you do?

1. At a minimum claim your Glassdoor profile (the free version) and respond to every single review that’s given in a position way. You might have a poor reputation, but candidates will see that you’re working on making it better.
2. Glassdoor is just one site, there are over a dozen you probably should be tracking. No one has time for that, but there is a technology already created to help do this on one platform called Ratedly. I actually wrote about this a while back on T3.  Created by Joel Cheesman who is a really smart thought leader in the HR and TA space, and the idea is so simple and effective, and inexpensive, you should really take a look.
3. Get your executives to understand why this is important. Of course, you don’t want a bad reputation, but also you have this extra issue of having it affect your applicant traffic which just made this reputation thing begin to have real pain!

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 tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net Also, I advise HR and TA tech companies. Interested? Let’s talk.