Why You Should Care About What Current and Past Employees Are Saying About Your Company Online

When looking for new employees, you want to set your company up for success. This may mean several things for your business when crafting your job posting ads.

It turns out that according to Career Builder nearly 75% of job seekers begin their search online. What does this mean for your hiring potential? It means you want a clean, respectable online reputation.

What’s being said about your business online is vital not only to your revenue stream but to your well-being as an appropriately staffed business with highly qualified team members.

Because of this, let’s look at why you should care about what current and past employees are saying about your company online.

Competition is Fierce

In today’s job market, you’ll find that competition is tough. What’s more, prospective employees can do a thorough search about your company online.

This is quite similar to the search you can do to learn more about them.

Many of the newest job seekers today are Millennials, and they head to the digital arena, making your employer branding more important than ever.

To attract the best talent, you need the best online reviews.

Be the Employer of Choice

To nab the best employees for your company, you first want to treat your current employees well.

Do your best to make sure your current staff never wants to leave. Put employee retention at the front of the list. Concentrate on creating a positive company culture that instills loyalty.

To be the employer of choice – the one people want to work for – create the best employee experience.

Consider what your employees are saying about you. If it isn’t positive, do something to change it.

Companies like Glassdoor exist to provide a platform for current and former employees to anonymously review businesses like yours as well as your management team.

Savvy job seekers head to sites like this to review you before applying.

What’s more, many job seekers turn to social media platforms like Facebook to check out your reviews. While most of your reviews may be about your business, some may be from your past or current employees.

These reviews affect your reputation and your ability to hire top talent.

Now let’s look at how to monitor your company online.

Create a Response Policy

You probably have one of these for negative customer reviews, but you also need one for employee reviews. This helps you keep emotion out of your response.

Put someone in charge of crafting a response – your HR department is a good place. Always respond with empathy but do give your side of the story.

It’s always a good idea to check with your lawyer first. You don’t want to create a lawsuit.

Monitor the Web for Reviews

Stay on top of the situation by monitoring several websites for employee reviews:

• Glassdoor.com
• Indeed.com
• Social media

It’s also a good practice to set up Google Alerts about your business. This catches comments made on websites, news articles, and blog posts.

Do this, and you have a chance to attend to the reviews before they become a problem for you.

Investigate

Always do your due diligence and research the employee’s complaint. Perhaps you’ve heard about it before, and perhaps you haven’t.

Look into the complaint before crafting a response and again, check with your company attorney and human resources staff before responding.

Final Thoughts

The best thing you can do for your business is put systems in place to encourage employee retention and create a positive company culture and healthy morale.

Create an employee-centric culture. It’s well known in customer service circles that happy employees create happy customers, so it’s a win for everyone when you treat your staff well.

Have an open communication policy and respond to issues in-house in a timely fashion to avoid employees heading to the internet to complain.

You might consider quarterly or twice yearly employee satisfaction surveys to get a handle on how your staff feels.

This helps you be proactive and avoid any future online negativity.

Are you a new startup ready to succeed? Are you looking to get your new business off the ground and watch it rise to success? We are here for you. We can help answer your questions and guide you through the process. Outsource your HR duties, finances, payroll and more to us. Contact Escalon today to get started.