Candidates are checking you out somewhere you're not looking

 

Most jobseekers aren't waiting for your careers page to form an opinion of you. They've usually made one up already, somewhere else.

Glassdoor's own research, a Harris Poll from June 2023, found that 83% of US job seekers are likely to research company reviews and ratings before deciding where to apply. That's most of your candidate pool, doing their homework somewhere you don't control and probably aren't checking often enough.

Nick Gallimore, Director of Talent Transformation at Advanced, put it plainly in HR Magazine: "We get four times as much traffic going to Glassdoor than our website in terms of job discovery and candidate vetting, so it's absolutely critical for us in enabling candidates to make decisions." If that's anywhere near typical, it changes what a careers page is for. It isn't where candidates learn about you first. It's where they go to confirm what they've already half-decided, based on reviews from people who used to sit where they're about to sit.

Review sites aren't a reputational risk to manage defensively, glanced at once a quarter when something goes wrong. They're a comms channel, read closely, with real influence on who applies.

So, what does managing that well actually look like? Glassdoor's own guidance for  employers comes down to three moves: acknowledge the issue honestly instead of brushing past it, explain your position with facts rather than a generic apology, and tell future candidates what to expect. A defensive, corporate-sounding reply reads worse than no reply at all.

Doing this consistently pays off. Around 80% of job seekers say their view of a company improves once they've seen it respond to a review, and Glassdoor cites research putting the cost of a poor reputation at roughly 10% more per hire. A pattern of similar complaints across dozens of reviews isn't noise to wait out. It's data, and it's data your competitors' candidates are reading before yours are.

The organisations getting this right aren't chasing a perfect five-star average. They're the ones replying like they're actually listening, because that reply is as visible to the next candidate as the original review.

Want the detail behind this? LHH's talent attraction report sets out how to build review monitoring into your everyday comms, not just your crisis plan, plus the specific language that turns a difficult review into a reason to apply. Download the full report here.