Communication, Reputation, Recruitment & The Power of Glassdoor Glassdoor for Employers
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Communication, Reputation, Recruitment & The Power of Glassdoor

When your role is promoting and protecting the reputation of a business then people recruitment for that business has always been part of what you do. If you succeed in communicating the right messages then the job your colleagues in the talent attraction team have to do is that bit easier.

But in recent years, with the emergence and growth of trusted organisations like LinkedIn, Indeed and particularly Glassdoor, the role of ‘communicator as recruiter’ has become much more defined and, if executed with focus, can really drive positive outcomes for talent attraction.

There is a common theme in both passive and active recruitment: information. Active candidates demand to be informed, and businesses should - if they want to stand out - demand the ability to inform potential candidates and future employees, even when they’re not actively looking for a new role.

For us at HomeServe, if we get the second part right, we communicate and inform in the right way through the right channels, we will be front of mind for candidates who might not previously have considered us when they begin their job hunt. And it goes beyond this - they will look to HomeServe as an employer they would be willing to move jobs for. Glassdoor gives us a unique opportunity to do this.

Through Glassdoor not only are we able to push information directly to talent in the form of content updates, we are also able to influence and inform people who are not currently considering a career at HomeServe, and may have not even heard of HomeServe before.

And the results? We know that in 2017 our Glassdoor content updates were seen nearly two million times. And while we also know that the talent seeing these updates may not immediately apply for a role with us, we have now started a conversation with them and they are aware of us as an employer. We also get really important analysis from Glassdoor that allows us to see which type of talent is interacting with our jobs and enables us to tailor our content updates as well as our job adverts around this.

Why reviews are important to HomeServe

Transparency is a huge part of HomeServe’s culture internally, so why not externally too? We encourage People to leave honest feedback, regularly - it gives a window into life at HomeServe and it helps us understand how we can improve. Not all of our reviews are positive - but that comes with the territory - and we always have an appropriate senior leader respond to reviews personally. This also lets the people reading our reviews know that we care, and we’re trying our best to ‘do the right thing’ – one of our People Promises.

Also, our hiring managers have seen a notable increase in people talking about our reviews at interview. Our top ten Glassdoor reviews were viewed over 10,000 times per month last year and so it’s even more important that we acknowledge Peoples’ comments.

How do we turn talent into candidates?

When people begin to look for jobs we know they become more active on platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor and that there are many touch points along the way. For example, our job adverts were seen over 400,000 times on Glassdoor last year, contributing to 50% more traffic to our company profile. Simply put, this is a fantastic way to get our brand seen by active talent.

The way that we think about attracting talent is changing: we can now understand the type of talent that is interacting with our jobs; we can also see which of our jobs are the most popular and what the rate of people applying is, so we are able to tailor our jobs for the audience.

Last year HomeServe recruited just over 1,000 new People into roles all across the business. We received more than 1,100 applications on Glassdoor, meaning that people began the process of applying and were referred to our careers website, making Glassdoor a really important tool for us.

So communicator as recruiter? Just add it to the list.

Learn More & Download

How to Recruit the Informed Candidate

A guide to attracting and hiring informed candidates on Glassdoor.

 

This article was originally published in LinkedIn Pulse. Reprinted with permission.