As a Headhunter, one of the biggest changes we have experienced in the last year, is the emergence and influence of the American website Glassdoor. The website is having an impact on the ability of Hiring Managers to be able to attract the best candidates versus those that just need a job.
Glassdoor is a site where employees and former employees anonymously review companies and their management. According to Crunchbase, Glassdoor has raised $161.5m in 6 rounds of funding to date including $70m from Google Capital last year. Just as TripAdvisor did for holidays, Glassdoor is changing the way we look at recruitment marketing and company culture and is a useful business intelligence tool for candidates to check out possible employers.
It has become the norm for candidates to check out their possible future employer on Glassdoor and come back to us, the Headhunter with their feedback, concerns and questions. For companies who have many poor reviews, this can have a major impact on their ability to attract the very best candidates, but from the candidate side, the site supports their decisioning and potentially prevents them from making a poor future career choice. It is not unusual for some Senior Sales candidates to pull out of a hiring process having reviewed Glassdoor, making it even harder for some firms to attract the best revenue generators in what is already a candidate driven market.
Maybe it is just me (or is it?) but, it seems relatively easy to spot the fake reviews on Glassdoor, the ones where current employees or perhaps senior management make up false positive reviews to dilute a sea of negative reviews.
As a long term Recruiter within the Software sector, I can confirm how hard it can be to recruit for companies that have a poor reputation for whatever that reason may be. I can also confirm that when a company has positive Glassdoor reviews, it becomes easier to sell the company to future employees and in fact we use that very fact to market companies and the roles we are hiring for.
Glassdoor is here to stay and will continue to be an important piece of the hiring jigsaw in the future and employers are certainly creating new strategies to make sure their firm is perceived positively.
Ben Watkins is a Director of Intrinsic Executive Search, and possesses nearly 20 years experience of Headhunting senior commercial Executives across the UK and Europe on behalf of emerging Enterprise Software and SaaS companies.
If you would like a FREE copy of our latest European SaaS Salary guide for benchmarking, please drop Ben an email: bew@intrinsicsearch.com