Company managers sometimes complain about high staff turnover, the lack of good specialists, and the low professionalism of applicants. They invest in recruitment, trying to find qualified staff, but the quality and level of candidates still remain low.
What could be the reason? Often, this situation is caused by the HR brand’s poor reputation on the Internet or its complete absence. Before responding to a vacancy, a qualified employee thoroughly studies information about the future employer, including the opinions of current and former employees. According to the Reputation House agency, negative employee reviews and a bad reputation will be the reason for 69% of applicants rejecting a vacancy offer from an organization. And even increasing the offer size by 100% will not be enough reason for a third of the candidates to become part of the team.
Reputation House: how employee reviews form an HR brand
Employer brand is how the public perceives a company, its “unique flavor”. It is built from many factors, including benefits to potential and existing employees, a compensation system, corporate programs, and internal policies and ethics. If there is no purposeful work, the HR brand is formed spontaneously. As a result, it may not turn out to be what you would like it to be.
The Reputation House team knows all about how to build a positive HR brand. For more than 10 years, the agency has been building and maintaining its reputation on the international market. Its specialists have developed their own secure software and two mobile apps to identify information trends and respond to them in a timely manner.
The team knows that building a strong HR brand sometimes requires more effort than building a reputation in general. For example, if there are complaints about a low-quality product, you can replace it, offer a discount, or apologize to the customer. While in the HR field, Reputation House works with employee reviews, among which there may be former employees. Their complaints may have been accumulated for more than one year, covering different aspects of work in the company, so it will be much more difficult to address and resolve them.
SERM from Reputation House: how does this technology work?
Search Engine Reputation Marketing is a comprehensive system that aims to bring resources with a positive and neutral tone about an employer to the first page of search results. We are talking specifically about the top 10 search results, since, according to research, 95% of people view only the first page of search results. Accordingly, if you push negative content to the next pages, job seekers simply won’t get to it.
The Reputation House’s SERM team forms the right opinion about the company’s HR brand, where there is no place for unmotivated dissatisfaction or misleading facts. Only verified information will be present on the web, which will create a positive perception of the employer on the part of potential applicants.
Before starting to work with employee reviews, Reputation House specialists analyze the existing informational field, determine the main platforms and topics of negativity, and identify the reasons for its appearance. After compiling an analytical report, the agency’s employees begin to:
- Prepare content that will reflect the company’s corporate culture and values and present it in a good light on the job market. The Reputation House team writes and publishes employee reviews on various thematic websites, social media, and other platforms that are of interest to potential job seekers.
- Displace negativity. SERM tools allow Reputation House to push negative information out of the top 10 search results. Instead, only neutral and positive content that reflects the concept of the client’s HR brand will appear on the first page. If unreliable reviews are identified, specialists request their removal from the website owners in a pre-trial procedure and, if necessary, defend the client’s interests in court.
- Track the dynamics. Simply pushing out negativity is not enough, as it can easily re-emerge. And it is not a fact that its source will be dissatisfied employees. Unscrupulous competitors can decide to take advantage of the vulnerability of the HR brand by organizing an informational attack on it. If the slightest changes in the tone of employee reviews are detected, the Reputation House team will immediately level them out.
The final cycle of work is the analysis of the achieved results, on the basis of which the strategy is revised. This allows for achieving even better results and reaching all the goals set by the client.
Positive HR brand: what are the benefits?
An attractive employer brand gives the company many perks, such as:
- Increase in the number of responses from qualified specialists. Applicants who are in demand are interested in the employer’s values, the level of corporate culture and ethics, and the opportunity for self-development, and not just the financial side of the job.
- Reduced salary costs. Candidates are more likely to choose an employer with a good reputation but lower pay than to accept a high-paying job at a company with a negative HR brand.
- Increasing the speed of vacancy closure. The more people who want to work for the company, the easier and faster it will be to find the right employee.
- Lower hiring costs. When people see positive employee reviews online, they start to want to work for a company that is caring and attentive to its staff. They send resumes themselves, which simplifies and speeds up the work of the HR department.
Reputation House’s work in SERM is a set of effective tools that will help a company improve its existing strategy for attracting and selecting employees. According to the famous management consultant Peter Ferdinand Drucker, “a company has no other asset that is more important and crucial than its personnel. It is only on the basis of highly qualified employees that it is possible to build communication and cooperation, form a team of effective performers, and achieve common goals”.