Reputation House, SERM, and Systematic Reputation Management: How to Build an Honest and Open Approach to Employee Feedback
The average person devotes a significant part of their life to work, so it is important for them to feel as comfortable as possible at their job. Therefore, it is not surprising that most job seekers study opinions about a company on the internet and look at its ratings on employer websites.
Experts on the importance of and managing employee reviews, Reputation House is an international agency with more than 10 years of experience in reputation management. According to recent research, up to 69% of candidates are willing to refuse an offer from an employer with a poor reputation, even if they are currently unemployed. It also turned out that if you increase the size of the offer by 100%, a third of applicants will still refuse it.
Reputation House: Employee Reviews Directly Influence HR Brands
A well-formed image allows a company to retain employees even if competitors offer higher wages. For many specialists, comfortable working conditions, a good team, and a developed corporate culture are just as important as a good salary. Therefore, an employer whose merits are well known will spend less effort and money on finding a qualified team than a company with a less strong HR brand.
According to the experience of Reputation House, reviews that are positive contribute to the following:
- Candidates will submit their resumes themselves, so the chances of selecting the best specialist increase.
- The motivation and initiative of employees increases. If current employees aren’t developing, the company can easily find a new specialist.
- Turnover is reduced because employees want to continue being a part of the team, sharing its values and mission.
- Engaged employees perform their jobs better, thereby creating loyalty among customers towards the organization as a whole.
- The company spends less money on training, education, and retraining of personnel.
Employee reviews, Reputation House specialists explain, that are posted on relevant sites and resources help to understand what mistakes a company makes in the HR area and what points need special attention paid to them. A negative impression will certainly scare away qualified applicants and make them doubt the integrity of their future employer.
Everyone understands that there are no perfect companies, so continuous positivity in the online space will cause doubts and mistrust. Using SERM tools, Reputation House creates a positive image of the employer on the internet, but with a small share of neutral and sometimes slightly negative reviews.
For reference:
SERM stands for “Search Engine Reputation Management” in search engines. Its task is to bring into the top 10 those resources that contain positive and neutral information about a company. As a result, job seekers, when typing queries about the brand into the search, see verified and up-to-date information. Writing and publishing articles, biographies, and employee reviews with Reputation House allows you to create the desired tone of the search results, thereby strengthening the client’s HR brand.
How to Work with Employee Reviews
As part of SERM, Reputation House carries out a whole range of activities, from posting content on various resources to monitoring audience reactions. Agency specialists emphasize that under no circumstances should comments from former and current employees be ignored. The audience values interaction with the company, because it means that the organization is interested in its problems and pains, tries to find solutions to difficult situations, and works to reach consensus.
Reputation House’s SERM tools allow you to push out negativity from the first page of search results, and in the most extreme cases, even remove reviews. Agency employees send a motivated appeal to the owners of resources where inaccurate content is posted. Most often, the problem is resolved pre-trial, but in extreme cases, the Reputation House reviews team removes these inauthentic reviews by going to court.
We must remember that employees share positive impressions of the employer much less often than negative ones. Therefore, it is important to encourage staff to leave positive comments on various resources, that is, they will act as HR brand ambassadors. And you must definitely respond to a positive comment, thereby reducing the distance between the employer and the staff and increasing audience loyalty.
When it comes to negative reviews, Reputation House experts tell us what to do. First you need to determine the reason why this opinion appeared:
- Poor HR work or mistakes during the interview process.
- Situational or systematic errors in the field of personnel management.
- Problems in work processes or corporate culture.
- Personal characteristics of the employee, including the tendency to emotionally express criticism.
The first three points are even useful for the company: they allow you to find weak points and eliminate them. For employee reviews, Reputation House advises responding to as many as possible, demonstrating the company’s desire to change for the better and take into account the opinions of staff. Answers should be based on the principles of objectivity and openness, with high-quality argumentation and a friendly attitude towards the addressee.
But there is a possibility of fake negativity initiated by competing companies. The optimal response is to remain neutral, working according to a template to prevent a conflict from breaking out.
An integrated approach, including not only SERM tools, allows Reputation House to build a powerful HR brand. Since 2010, the agency has implemented more than a hundred successful cases, helping well-known companies restore and maintain a good reputation. A positive image in the online space, created, among other things, through the work of Reputation House with reviews within the framework of SERM, is the key to the successful development of the company.
