This might date me a little bit, but a few of you may remember back when Vault, the first employer review site to emerge in what’s become a competitive category, came on the scene. It was, in retrospect, a concept that was far ahead of its time. In 1996, when Vault.com first went online, Monster (and by extension, job boards) was less than two years old, and even CareerBuilder started building careers only a few months before Vault debuted.
Employer review sites, largely led by Glassdoor and Indeed, have become increasingly ubiquitous over the past two decades or so since Vault first gave candidates a resource to access company reviews, posted anonymously by current employees – good, bad, or indifferent.
While recruiters and employers often debate their relative merits, the truth of the matter is that online job postings have coexisted with employer review sites from the very beginning, and are every bit as integral a part of most candidates’ online job search as job postings themselves.
The acquisition of Glassdoor (currently the #2 most visited online career destination in the world) by Indeed (currently #1) underscores the fact that job seekers today aren’t just looking for open jobs, but they’re doing their due diligence on the companies posting them, too.
A whopping 78% of job seekers utilized employee review sites to form an opinion about a respective employer in their most recent job search, and fully 60% of job seekers reported reading employer reviews before applying for an open role or actually contacting a company.
Additionally, about 2 in 3 used employer review sites to research benefits and salary either before or during the hiring process – which, contrary to popular belief, is actually the primary reason job seekers actually visit review sites (the reviews themselves are actually second place by a fairly wide margin).
The inordinate amount of influence employer reviews have on talent attraction and candidate engagement are obvious. So too is the need for recruiters and employers to more actively manage their profile and presence on review sites, and, by extension, ensure maximum return for the estimated $20 billion in annual spend companies invest globally in job advertising and employer branding.
Because when it comes to converting passive seekers into active applicants, transparency and accountability are the bottom line when it comes to recruiting ROI.
Unlike most internet companies founded in 1996 (Jeeves, where did you all go?), however, Vault is still around today, proving the permeance and pervasiveness of the category they more or less launched. And if you haven’t been on there for a while, it’s actually still a valuable tool for researching company rankings and reviews.
Of course, while Vault was the pioneer, today it’s only one of at least 17 dedicated employer review sites flourishing online – by my count, anyway. I’m sure it’s probably higher, but the point is that every one of these sites has the ability to make (or break) your company’s recruiting and hiring efficiency and efficacy.
And while these sites share some obvious similarities, the truth is that for every employer, each review site is unique in the insights and information they provide to candidates, and how much control (or lack thereof) employers have when it comes to managing their company profile, replying to reviews and engaging candidates.
The Top 5 Employer Review Sites Every Hiring Pro Should Know
This differentiation between employer review sites, therefore, requires recruiters to implement slightly different strategies to ensure recruiting success, rather than adopt a one size fits all approach – and while there are a few big players out there, the truth is, when you ignore a public employer review site of any kind, you’re not doing yourself any favors when it comes to making hiring happen.
With that in mind, let’s briefly go over the top 5 employee review sites – what I’m going to call the “Big 5,” as they’re the most prevalent and prominent players out there (in no particular order, by the way):
Glassdoor
Glassdoor, which has become somewhat synonymous with employer review and ratings sites, has an estimated 45 million reviews on 830,000 companies in North America alone; the site attracts over 60 million visitors every month in the US, making it second only to Indeed in terms of overall job seeker traffic.
The popularity (and ubiquity) of Glassdoor has led to company profiles that tend to be extremely in-depth and insightful, and the hundreds or thousands of ratings most enterprise employers have accrued tend to be highly accurate and reliable (although this certainly isn’t always the case).
While companies have a history of blaming negative reviews or feedback on disgruntled employees or unsuccessful candidates, the truth is that Glassdoor is probably one of the most accurate sources of company and job information, interview insights, salary and benefits guidance in existence.
Its impact on employer branding, talent attraction and hiring success (good or bad) is impossible to ignore – even though many HR leaders probably prefer to do so instead of having to make up a bunch of excuses to a problem they likely created in the first place.
Indeed
Yeah, Indeed is the biggest job aggregator out there. And yes, it’s owned by the same company as Glassdoor (which also aggregates job postings). But did you know that Indeed currently has over 72 million reviews – which ranks it ahead of Glassdoor in volume for both job postings and company reviews (and by a wide margin).
Indeed, unlike Glassdoor, tends to emphasize engagement not only between prospective hires and potential employers, but between prospective and current employees, too. My favorite feature on Indeed is a Q&A section where candidates can crowdsource information and insights directly from current and former employees at a company.
Presumably, their answers are more accurate – and influential – than any chatbot out there. Or career site FAQ, for that matter.
Kununu
Funny name, serious review site. Kununu, a joint venture between Monster Worldwide (remember them?) and German language social network Ning, often flies under most candidates’ radar, but Google for Jobs has built Kununu reviews into their native results, causing a significant spike in traffic, relative importance and visibility for what might be one of the most useful and comprehensive employer review sites out there.
I really like Kununu because it goes beyond just a simple star rating system or NPS score and really provides a lot of information on company culture, career development and even often overlooked (but imperative) workplace success indicators, such as parking accessibility, office location, workplace safety, corporate social responsibility and environmental friendliness.
It even scores how challenging workers find their jobs relative to their expectations and experience, providing the “slack rankings” most job seekers always wanted, even if they never knew it before.
Comparably
Comparably is comparably small relative to an Indeed or Glassdoor, but its emphasis on culture insights is a significant differentiator, particularly when it comes to compensation and benefits information, which is the top reason job seekers report visiting review sites in the first place.
Comparably assigns every employer a “culture score” – which, in turn, is reflected in reviews and ratings across 18 different benchmarks, ranging from office culture and professional development to inclusion by gender or protected class to metrics on individual departments, like marketing and HR.
The result is a site that provides deep insight into what working at an employer is really like and, more importantly, the ability to sort and segment that data so that it’s relevant enough for candidates to not only find the right job at the right company, but also, the right culture fit, too.
It’s important to note that Comparably, a closely held startup, has a much smaller scope than some of the competition, featuring only US employers, although this allows for benchmarking culture scores (and compensation) against similar sized companies in each employers’ respective area and industry – because, even though employer reviews are driven by content, context still counts, too.
InHerSight
InHerSight focuses on female job seekers, and its reviews tend to emphasize the metrics that matter most to working women – things like flexibility, maternity and adoptive leave policies, management and development opportunities for female employees and cultural inclusiveness.
This information is present on many of the other sites, but these are much more general than the female focused reviews – and gender-specific rankings – available on InHerSight. In addition to its deep company profiles and insightful reviews, the site also provides information and resources – not to mention conversation and community – by women, for women.
There are a few other similar sites – FairyGodBoss, for example – but InHerSight is definitely worth considering when you’re considering how to make gender equality happen.
Captain Obvious: A Coda
Hi, Captain Obvious, here. These sites are good for job seekers AND recruiters. Just, you know, in very different ways.
For job seekers, the front end research these sites enable provide the sort of insight that helps candidates go beyond job fit and figure out how well they’re actually aligned with a prospective employer. This inside information is the sort of stuff candidates care about, not the generic boilerplates and superfluous superlatives that tend to make job descriptions anything but.
I’ve always preached that every job seeker should have a formalized search strategy. A big part of that strategy needs to be research.
Most job seekers tend to look at review sites either too early in the search process or too late; it’s easy to dismiss a company without applying based solely on online reviews, or be too far along in the hiring process for those reviews to matter (or even, to be addressed).
There’s a “just right,” though; job seekers should start building a list of target companies at the beginning of their search, and use this to figure out not what jobs are open right now, but which companies are the right fit, even if it’s not right now – and which companies are never going to be a place worth working at.
When you’re looking for a job, what you don’t know can (and will) hurt you. Employers do background and reference checks to prevent making bad hires. Feel free to return the favor.
A side note: as far as the comments in each respective sites’ company review section: remember to take those at face value. Don’t only look at ratings or relative rankings, but also the consistency (or lack thereof) and underlying themes in these reviews.
It could be that whatever a company “Needs to Improve” has no relevance to what you’re looking for in a job or an employer – the “Recommendations to Management” section is generally a much better barometer for this than reviews, ironically enough.
One last piece of advice – pay attention to company responses to written reviews. If they’re responding at all, consider it a good sign. If they’re canned or generic – and most are – at least they took the time to reply, which is more than many employers can say.
If they care enough to respond to an online review, then consider that a good sign they care enough to listen to and respond to their actual employees, too.
Recruiting Teams: What’s in It For Me?
These sites are vital to your candidate attraction success. After reviewing several hundred company review sites over the last couple of months, it is evident that recruiting organizations, community managers or whomever is responding to employee comments needs to up their game. In this writer’s opinion, those who don’t respond to reviews especially negative feedback, are basically showing their hand.
When I have spoken to TA Leaders and ask why they are not responding it boils down to not enough time, resources or they do not know how to respond to positive or negative comments. Knowing that review sites can sway a candidate’s decision to apply, interview or accept an offer. With a 3.5% unemployment rate, do you really want to take your chances?
As a Corporate Talent Acquisition Leader, I knew we couldn’t hire a resource dedicated to recruitment marketing/brand, so I took 30 minutes of my day to respond to each review on two of the five sights mentioned above. My responses were not canned nor generic.
When issues arose, I presented them to my HR Business Partners to address and get back with me with a solution. We also created an Employer Brand Ambassador program encouraging our employees to be more vocal on review site and share opportunities with their social communities.
Between responding to reviews and gaining employee buy-in to our ambassador program, our company reputation on Glassdoor 3.1 to 3.8, Refer a friend from 54% to 62%, and a Company CEO Rating from 70% to 85%. What I also noticed was that the number of reviews coming in tripled.
Recruiting Leaders, don’t use time as an excuse. Make it happen. Responding on as many of these sites is key. You will not find as many reviews as you will on Glassdoor and Indeed, but if you are focused on growing women in leadership roles, you should be responding on InherSight.
All in all, review sites are a benefit for both job seekers and organizations. One for research and one for talent attraction. Both have a choice to benefit by investing their time. Both could lead to a bad decision by ignoring reviews.
It all depends on which side you’re on.
