Your organisational culture is already on the street. 5 tips for making a better impression.
Your organisation’s culture is increasingly visible to the outside world, without people even having to step inside. It’s not only the various lists, like World Class Workplace, Great Place to Work and Most Inspiring Organisations, that already give potential job candidates a glimpse of what your organisation is and perhaps should not be. Half of all applicants will have consulted various review sites, such as Indeed, Glassdoor and Jobsome, and employers can do much more to benefit from that fact. Here are 5 tips.
Companies that currently rank high as attractive employers did not achieve their lofty positions by pushing their messages. No, they score high because there’s something particularly good about their organisations, products or HR policies. So good in fact that their target groups and markets are talking about them. They’ve created impact and hence attractiveness. Such companies regard their organisational culture as an employer brand.
Review sites
Customer and user reviews are increasingly important in every sales process. After all, before booking hotels we’ll first check Tripadvisor to see what other guests have said about them. Because there are no direct commercial interests behind such customer reviews, we tend to value these opinions of strangers more than the number of stars a hotel has or the scores some travel organisation awarded itself, for example. Before ordering something from an unfamiliar website we first look to see how other customers have rated them. Is the product good? Was it delivered on time?
And same holds for organisations. When perusing employer review sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, and Jobsome Potential, employees look for signs of trust. Is it a club they want to join, they ask themselves, before eagerly reading the testimonies of the mainly former employees who anonymously opine about their employers:
“They didn’t clean the office, but there are complaints about high absenteeism rates.”
“Nice work, nice colleagues, many possibilities and opportunities, secondary employment conditions are lacking and communication about them is often unclear, however. Long processes to get something done at HR.”
“Devastating because of all the reorganisations over the years.”
After so much often honesty, who can blame potential applicants for thinking twice; after all, there are plenty of vacancies out there these days, so perhaps it’s better to just keep looking. How can organisations make review sites or award-winning work to their advantage?
Measure your organisation
Measuring your organisation against yardsticks like World Class Workplace and Great Place to Work provides insight into what your employees value, what areas the organisation should work on, and where you score according to Top Employership. The last thing your organisation wants to be right now is the job market’s best kept secret. Effectory claims that top scorers get 50% more applicants than others. Moreover, high scores make your employees feel extra proud, leading to more referral recruitment. Be sure to note your high scores on your ‘Careers at’ webpage, and also those from the various review sites.
Attractive information
Review sites offer additional opportunities for attractively presenting your organisation. Don’t forget to use all available means. Write about your organisation’s purpose, about the value your organisation offers to customers and society.
Detail the innovation you’re investing in to make your products and services even better, and about your core values and how you implement them. Talk about how your employees grow and prosper and about your internal collaborations. Note the eNPS. And don’t forget the option of using additional photos and scheduled maintenance of content, as you do with your ‘Careers at’ webpage.
Pro-actively ask for reviews
Many reviews are written by former employees who feel they weren’t listened to and now want to express their dissatisfaction anonymously. It is of course better to prevent this from happening in the first place, by engaging in dialogue at an earlier stage. But that said, review sites are not in fact complaint sites. To ensure an accurate picture is presented, invite all your employees to leave reviews, asking them to do so after an onboarding is complete for example, or when contracts are extended or career development processes completed. By providing more reviews, you’ll prevent just a handful of reviews from leaving a bad impression.
Respond to reviews
Many organisations barely pay attention to what’s being said about them. Employers can of course respond to the reviews on the various sites, yet this rarely happens. Missed opportunities. You should respond in a pleasant manner, showing understanding and offering the people writing the reviews opportunities to start a dialogue. The way an organisation responds also gives readers a glimpse of how it deals with criticism.
Engage with criticism
Review sites show how scores develop over the years. If it’s not an upward trend, there’s work to be done, because winning in the outside world starts internally. So engage with the criticism. Start conversations, conduct employee experience research, and get to work on the weak points.
