When you have a strong employer brand, your employees are more engaged and recruiting is easier. But how do you get there? We gathered employer branding pros to discuss how they do it at our most recent Power Panel: Boost Your Brand On Glassdoor.
Alison Hadden, Glassdoor’s Senior Director of Brand Strategy, kicked things off with an important statistic from Edelman: 84% of engaged employees believe they have the potential to impact the quality of the organization’s products compared to 31% of disengaged employees. An authentic employer brand that shows what it’s really like to work at your company will drive bottom line results.
Employer branding makes recruiting is easier
For Lithium, a strong employer brand means more money allocated toward employee referral programs, and less spent on staffing agencies. Britt Ryan, Head of Global Recruiting, shared that 44% of hires come from employee referrals at Lithium. The company encourages all employees to recruit, offering double or triple referral bonuses for key hires. They also conduct referral “jam sessions,” with employees to help them dig into LinkedIn to find referrals.
Pinterest’s employer branding efforts have a specific focus on hiring engineers. Karen Lieu, Recruiting Programs Manager, explained how the company developed videos focused on the engineering team. One shows employees talking about why they came and why they stay, another shows the whole product development cycle from idea to ship.
Ann Poletti, Senior Director of Employment Brand Marketing at DocuSign shared a story about an internal interview project turned into an employer brand video. When the video was posted, applications doubled within three months, and blog traffic increased significantly. The “We Are DocuSign” employer branding project, now updated weekly, has been a hit with candidates and employees alike. Poletti shared that 45-50% of hires come from referrals, and like Lithium, DocuSign also hosts referral jam sessions.
Respond to feedback
Responding to feedback is a team sport at Pinterest, Lithium, and CARFAX. Lieu shared how at Pinterest they have guidelines on what to respond to, and draft responses before posting. “But the response itself isn’t as important as what you do with the content,” she said. Both Ryan and Larry Gamache, communications director for CARFAX, echoed her comment with their own stories about the difficulty of seeing negative reviews come in.
“They’re really a blessing in disguise,” Lieu said. Gamache elaborated, “It’s great to get the positive reviews, but we’ve learned more from the negative reviews.” Ryan cautioned that scathing reviews are normal, as there’s always someone who’s never going to be happy wherever they work. “You just have to embrace the negative stuff and move forward,” she advised.
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Learn from the experts
There’s no doubt that your professional connections matter. There’s plenty to learn from your employer branding peers, whether it’s online admiration, virtual contact, an or in-person relationship. Panelists offered examples of all three categories as places where they get inspiration. Lieu swaps strategies and advice with her cohort down the street at Airbnb, while Gamache exchanges information with The Motley Fool, another Washington, D.C.-area technology company.
“If you see a company doing something you admire,” Gamache said, “call them.” Panel moderator Katie Burke, Vice President of Culture & Experience at Hubspot, offered that it’s easy to find out information when you’re willing to say, “we’re not great at that, and we’d like to learn from you.” Salesforce, a DocuSign investor and partner, has been a source of inspiration for Poletti as well as other tech leaders such as Google and eBay. She also mentioned Facebook’s unconscious bias training program as a positive influence.
Track your metrics
Your employer brand can be measured in many ways: employee surveys, time to hire, number of applicants, career site traffic, and so forth. Both Lieu and Ryan emphasized the importance of considering traffic to your Glassdoor page, and putting it into the context of people looking for jobs and potentially visiting your career site afterward. Ryan said that opening an office in Bangalore significantly increased the percentage of traffic from India to Lithium’s Glassdoor page. They used this information to develop a separate Glassdoor page for India, so that these candidates could see what it’s like inside their office.
Gamache cautioned that lifetime value of an employee or a customer is much more important than overall traffic. He’s more concerned with showing potential candidates what it’s really like to work at CARFAX far up the funnel—before they even apply. An educated candidate is more likely to turn into an engaged employee.
At DocuSign, ranking on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list is also an important metric; Poletti focuses on key lists relevant to their industry. Gamache mentioned that ranking on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work and Highest Rated CEOs lists has had a positive impact on the brand, and is more meaningful than other lists because it comes from the employees themselves.
You can watch the recording of this information-packed power panel here.
Want even more from Glassdoor? Register now to attend this year’s 3rd annual Glassdoor Summit!
