Sue Unerman of MediaCom recently blogged about their recent career's conference and the emergence of www.glassdoor.com as an employer review site. "Marketing directors can try and deliver as complete a brand experience as they like, but as well as the very easy access consumers now have to customer reviews and twitter feeds about the brand, they can also easily access how employees inside the company really feel about it." Sue wrote about Glassdoor which derives it's content anonymously from employees which result in a company rating. There is also www.jobvent.com which doesn't look as good but also doesn't rate Mediacom so highly (sorry Sue).
It seems to me that these sites are trying to be the www.tripadvisor.com for recruitment and employee engagement - but are they really? Do they have the depth of content? Can employers manipulate them using outsourced services? Are they the home of the company moaner?
You can use your LinkedIn network to search for and communicate with current and past employees, this should give you more qualitative research than Glassdoor or JobVent. Having said that Europeans are not great networkers and may well adopt the employer review sites instead. I wonder how long it will be until we have an employer comparison site? In the UK we have www.bestcompanies.co.uk which is qualitative research on employers by their employees. As Sue says "Your employees are your brand more than ever before". Therefore to recruit the best talent to continue to develop brand reputation it is vital that the employee experience matches the employer branding. To follow Sue's blogs click here
