5 Actionable Tips on How to Improve Glassdoor Ratings

Positive Glassdoor reviews are considered a sign of good employer brand, strong work culture and happy employees by many job seekers.

Imagine you are the HR head for a company. One of your employees leaves an unbelievably bad Glassdoor review – a one-star rating for the CEO and an awfully negative outlook for the company’s culture.

This lowers you Glassdoor rating from 3.5 to 3. To top it, your CEO sends an email about the same review and demands an explanation.

What do you do? Technically you cannot delete Glassdoor reviews (unless it is illegal) nor can you locate the employee since it is anonymous.

More than 22 million members visit Glassdoor for 6 million ratings, reviews, and interview experiences on more than 300,000 companies worldwide.

According to CNBC, 1 in 3 people have turned down a job offer because of a company’s bad online reviews.

A negative Glassdoor review can rob your company’s reputation and if it’s fake, the loss is inevitable.

How does negative Glassdoor reviews impact your business?

1Increased hiring costs

A report by LinkedIn states that the cost per hire is 2 times lower for companies with strong employer  brands. Positive reviews increase the pool of talent considering your organization and attract better candidates. 

Glassdoor has influence over 60 million users per month. Imagine the time you invest to recruit good candidates.

Bad reviews ultimately lead to higher recruiting cost and lower acceptance of offers and you end up with under qualified candidates.

2Business operations & growth

Research shows that at least half of consumers won’t conduct business with companies who have Glassdoor ratings of less than 4 /5. Negative Glassdoor reviews damage your prestige, profitability and trustworthiness of  your business. 

Strategic partnerships, and if they are new,  are at most risk when your partners see negative reviews on your profile. This is more critical when the CEO’s rating is low.

3Low CEO rating

Glassdoor allows employees to rate their CEO’s. A low rating for the CEO can imply  a rotten apple in the industry. 

In one study, executives attributed 45% of their brand reputation to the CEO’s reputation.

Over the past few years culture and people have become a significant part of business, that there are now roles to oversee people and culture.

These roles are specifically focused on employee engagement and experience focused on creating a high performing workforce within companies.

With rising remote work trends, culture and people now have a more prominent place. Ultimately it is seen that companies with better culture attract top talents, more revenue, and a solid brand reputation.

Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.- Angela Ahrendts

Having said this, it is even more important now to have positive Glassdoor reviews which reflect strong employee brand and culture.

5 steps to improve your Glassdoor reviews

1Adapt based on the reviews

Instead of trying to hide or flag negative Glassdoor reviews, go through each review to see if there is a pattern in those negative reviews, like career advancements, low pay, politics and gossip.

If yes, then this is something that you may have to fix at your end internally.

With remote or distributed teams, it is of utmost importance to understand the pulse of your employees.

You can use employee feedback or employee engagement surveys to look for suggestions and take steps to improve on building an employee -first culture.

Most companies use online reputation management options. Online reputation management may be of no use if the problem is with your culture or something that you have also witnessed within the business.

Unhappy employees will not make your business successful.

2 Respond to reviews

 As for best practices, you should review Glassdoor reviews to see what people are saying and respond to all reviews, positive or negative.

Don’t get scared when you see a negative one-star review. If you come across a negative Glassdoor review, make sure you learn from it, react professionally, respond, and do not twist them.

Responding to negative reviews requires a good understanding of the company’s policies and procedures as well as a well thought out response.

65% of Glassdoor users agree that you can improve when your employer responds to reviews. When you respond to employee reviews, tell them that you appreciate them and use their feedback to find ways to improve your work environment and culture.

For negative reviews, you should counter them by asking responsible, long-standing employees to support their review.

Most negative reviews can be anonymous. You can request a private meeting and show genuine concern to mediate the problem.

Do not forget to respond to the positive reviews and acknowledge how important they are.

3Encourage employees to provide reviews

 If you don’t have reviews, less reviews or more negative reviews than this solution is for you. Develop a campaign to encourage employees to share their experiences on Glassdoor. 

Inform your staff about what Glassdoor is and why it is important for them to give feedback on the forum. Make sure they understand what it is all about and how the review process works. 

In addition to reviews, Glassdoor also has a wide range of employee ratings, such as employee satisfaction, employee performance and job security.

Getting people to review your business can work wonders for your brand. While you can encourage your employee to rate, the only way to get ratings that portray your employer’s brand in a positive light is to improve the employee experience.

4Have a plan

 If there are a lot of negative reviews, try to locate the employees. But with most reviews being anonymous this may be difficult, and more so if a former employee.

In case of current employees, try to talk to your department or even all your staff if you find that you are receiving negative reviews on Glassdoor.

Happy employees hardly leave a review because they are content. Locate your happy employees and ask them specifically to leave a review.

Using key moments when your employees are happy – like new hire joining, engagement score > 4.5,  virtual games, bonus day, promotion, recognitions and awards.

Using these moments to request your employees to leave a Glassdoor review can work wonders for your brand and increase your brand reputation.

Also, from your end post pictures on your social media platforms. This is inclusive of Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to name a few.

Culture, work- life balance and employee engagement are the key research points for job seekers. And pictures can convey this much better than words.

5 Tools

Wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically ask your most engaged employees to leave a review on Glassdoor?

What if the same tool allows you to reach out to your disgruntled anonymous employees and hear them out?

There are several tools out there in the market which will allow you to transfer positive internal reviews to Glassdoor.

If you are a remote company, I am sure you have already invested in a people insights tool. Use these tools to leverage positive reviews and post it on Glassdoor.

 Peoplebox’s automated engine captures employees’ feedback regularly. It makes your employees brand ambassadors hence helping you build a great employer brand with a very little effort and in an organic way.

It redirects your happy employees to Glassdoor to share great reviews and enables you to reach out to your unhappy employees anonymously.

The results are reduced hiring efforts and employees’ loyalty. Happy employees can be used to portray positive culture. This can be particularly helpful if your Glassdoor page has a lot of negative reviews.

Happy employees are 13% more productive than their counterparts. They are the foundation for stability and growth of your business.

Improving negative Glassdoor reviews is one way to build a solid brand reputation. But what is more valuable here is actually investing in your people and culture.

Giving a positive employee experience will automatically create a good name for your business and will ultimately lead to better employer brand.