Glassdoor Shifts Focus to helping Recruiters as Talent War heats up

Employer review site Glassdoor is slowly beginning to shift from a platform for workers to review their employers to helping companies employ the right people, says their CEO.

With more than 41 million monthly visitors, Glassdoor is increasingly being used by employees to find the right job for them, so getting it right can help employers attract and close top-tier talent. As skills shortages are hitting home across the planet, the talent battle is getting tighter.

Robert Hohman, chief executive officer of Glassdoor, told Bloomberg Law in a recent interview:

“Employers are the ones who are on their back heel now, and they’re having to define who they are, what they stand for, why someone should want to join them, and they want to differentiate themselves.”

Glassdoor’s contribution to this evolution has been transparency, believes Hohman.  The company;s platform gives employees and job candidates the chance to leave honest, candid feedback on their interview and employment experiences.

Employers were initially sceptical about the service, but now some even use reviews in their recruitment campaigns.

Hohman says: “When Glassdoor launched, a lot of employers were very uncomfortable with what we did, but about five years ago, those sentiments changed.

“Now employers see the value in bringing transparency to their work environment.  The biggest thing we’ve managed to pull off is to create this community where it’s truthful but it’s constructive. It has not devolved into a cesspool or a rant site – that balance is very, very tricky.”

“Our mission hasn’t changed since our founding. It’s to help people find a job at a company they love.” he says.

Office branding

Many employers are now going beyond merely doing employer branding, and going all out with office branding too.

Office branding expert Mary O’Neill from office branding specialists, Altadicta, explains:

“We work with large and small employers on office branding projects so that when an employee walks into a building, they will feel like they are part of a team.  Office branding can play an important part in your employee communications – a well branded office makes people feel valued, included and reinforces the company’s core values.  Likewise, when the clients walk in, they feel welcome and the whole experience is reassuring and positive – it adds value in so many ways.  Our clients include Coca Cola and Diageo, but you can read more about the projects we have worked on here: https://www.altadicta.co.uk/projects

From Reviews to Recruiting

Today, however, helping someone find that job includes helping companies find that right person.

Glassdoor data revealed that more and more job seekers were using the site to find work and saw that their access to company information could be invaluable in the recruiting process. In fact, 83 percent of Glassdoor users now report that job searching is their No. 1 reason for visiting Glassdoor.

Glassdoor is offering job advertising and employer branding services—which make up the majority of the company’s revenue—including recruiting solutions, job advertising, job posting, and employer branding. The company currently has more than 6,400 employer clients, including approximately 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

HR’s Evolution

Evolution in recruitment strategies isn’t just changing how Glassdoor does its job but also how human resources departments operate. HR departments are increasingly using marketing strategies to attract and retain top workers and are also investing in analytics to figure out where resources can be used to optimize hiring efforts, Hohman said.

Holman claims that HR needs to realise that it must become a strategic arm of an organization instead of the administrative and compliance-focused department of the past.

He says:

“More and more CEOs are waking up to the realization that they have an acute talent problem.  Working with HR leaders can help them begin to overcome that challenge.  CEOs know precisely what strategy they need to execute to win, but they don’t have the talent to do it. “

Glassdoor, far from instilling fear with employee reviews, is fast becoming an employer’s biggest ally in the war for talent.