How Glassdoor Can Add Value to Your Resourcing Strategy Glassdoor for Employers
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How Glassdoor Can Add Value to Your Resourcing Strategy

It is clear that candidate behaviours have changed over the last few years: the days of companies having the pick of the talent have gone and it really is a candidate-driven market as we see an increasing skills shortage across hard-to-fill roles. It paints a pretty bleak picture for an internal resourcing function, but this is where sites such as Glassdoor can really add value to your resourcing strategy.

We have seen an increase in candidates citing Glassdoor as a reference point for their decision-making process (what we are calling “informed candidates”) when choosing a company to work for, and not only with the dreaded millennial candidate but also increasingly at a senior level. Only last month, we had an Associate Director join our business and fed back that our Glassdoor reviews helped to separate us from our competitors. While that is a positive story, I am sure there are plenty of candidates who go on to Glassdoor and will see a negative review, or a moan about our performance review process or something that generally says Grant Thornton is not the agile, flexible and enterprising environment that our resourcing team believe it to be. So what can we do about this? The answer: engage and embrace it.

We appreciate that we don’t always get it right for all people, and actually, that acknowledgment on sites such as Glassdoor is often enough to turn one person’s negative experience of working here, into a positive for a potential candidate. We open ourselves up to people’s opinion and then start a dialogue. This is real-time, unfiltered feedback…it is so valuable. We have taken examples of negative feedback around issues such as speed of process and shown this to our hiring managers to refine a process and improve it. It isn’t rocket science but the simple fact is that the candidate marketplace has become a customer market, and we need to engage and listen to what our customers want.

Equally, we have seen benefit to those candidates that have used Glassdoor to help them with their research around a company. These informed candidates are the recruiter’s dream…they are already bought into the values of the organisation, they are aligned to our purpose of shaping a vibrant economy and are in general well prepared. Put simply, the time that our recruiters need to invest in the informed candidate is less than that of candidates sourced from elsewhere.

When you have a candidate like this, the interview process tends to be better, not just for the candidate but also for the hiring manager. The interviews are of course about technical ability, but hiring managers are finding that they are having better quality conversations around the non-technical things that makes for a successful career at Grant Thornton.

So the cynic may say that Glassdoor is giving rise to some sort of “super millennial” that can ‘blag’ through an interview and come across as engaged and bought in and everything a hiring manager could ever want, when we all know that the reality is that a millennial candidate won’t stick around and be a nightmare to manage (we read this rhetoric everywhere, so it must be fact!). Well, our reality is that the “informed” candidate is having the opposite effect – they are sticking around longer, they are obtaining above average performance reviews, they are connecting with our purpose and ultimately having a bigger impact on our business.

We are investing in advertising on Glassdoor for exactly this reason, we want to ensure that our resourcing strategy focuses on bringing in the highest possible quality candidate in the most commercial way.

Sam Harrison is a Resourcing Team Manager at Grant Thornton UK LLP. This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse. Reprinted with permission.

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