“Asking if a company has ever had a bad review online is like asking if someone’s ever been on a bad date,” said one president.
Here’s the problem, and it happens a lot: Job-seekers find an opening and immediately research the employer. They visit the company website, along with LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
And that’s when they spot it: the negative employee review.
Bad reviews can impact a company and make talent recruitment hard. In fact, a January 2017 report from Glassdoor found that of the 238 job-seekers who participated in the study, those who’d seen a bad review of their prospective company asked for a salary bump, on average, 55 to 60 percent higher than that from their current company. By contrast, those who’d seen neutral employer reviews wanted a pay raise 45 to 50 percent higher.
And those who’d seen a positive review? A raise of 35 to 40 percent.
This problem is ubiquitous. Carol Lee Andersen, president of Questback, an enterprise-feedback and management-solution company, in The Woodlands, Texas, says that every company gets bad reviews.
“Asking if a company has ever had a bad review online is like asking if someone’s ever been on a bad date,” Andersen said via email. “In an ideal world, neither would exist. But that’s not reality. Negative reviews may be unavoidable. But the real loss for a company is not learning and growing from the insight, so that today we can become better employers than yesterday.”
When employers take the time to study those negative reviews, they can find ways to improve the workplace and the employee experience.
Always respond respectfully.
It could be tempting to deny or fight back against a review that seems unfair or even made up. However, this can make matters worse and hurt a company’s reputation.
When Kristina Groves, an account executive for the PR firm Volume PR, in Denver, Colo., worked as a recruiter at a direct sales company, she found a disgruntled summer intern’s review on Glassdoor complaining about compensation. The problem: The company didn’t have an internship program.
“I responded to the review on the website,” Groves told me via email. “I was very straightforward, honest and humble, and I thanked [the writer] for taking the time to write a review. Then, I stated that we had never had an intern in our…
