In this session, learn how review platforms are impacting your hiring and what you can do to fix that.

About our speakers

• Chelsea Craig runs Rhino Reviews, a reputation management company. Learn more about Rhino at www.rhino-reviews.com.
• Justin Vajko runs Dialog, a recruitment marketing agency for blue collar employers in Wisconsin and Minnesota. We use social media, videos, and online reviews to help great employers attract great talent. Learn more about us at www.recruitwithdialog.com.

Justin Vajko: Chelsea, thanks for meeting with me to talk about online reviews and employer branding, how those coalesce. So I've got a few questions here for you because I think a lot of people aren't aware of just how important online reviews are for employer branding. Can you tell me a little bit about what you guys do at Rhino Reviews and we'll just start there.

Chelsea Craig: Yeah, it sounds great. Thanks for having me, Justin, excited to talk about this. I'm very passionate about this subject. Online reviews are, especially in the past two to three years since COVID, has really kind of changed the game, only growing in importance. The biggest shift that we're seeing, though, is beforehand, when you thought about online reviews and online reputations, we thought so much about the company from a customer standpoint, and what we've really seen is the shift to the importance of these reviews and your reputation from an employee branding perspective. Employers are turning online to shop for new jobs, the same way that they're going to Amazon to try and find the latest toy or toilet paper back in the day. So when you talk about what your employee reputation looks like, it can be a huge factor into why you're not getting those applicants, and why people aren't taking that next step and going to your page.

Chelsea: And when hiring is at one of the most competitive times it's been, it can really either be incremental and help you achieve those hiring goals or be what's really preventing you and keeping you from getting those great candidates. Just as customer reviews go, unfortunately, it's normally the disgruntled and upset employees that are the ones that take the initiative to actually go leave and post those reviews. So if you're not actively managing, watching and you don't have a strategy to grow your positive reviews, you could really... You're only getting one side out there about your brand and it's not typically one that you're going to be very proud of.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. I see that. I mean, we had a conversation a couple weeks ago with somebody, and they're not actively managing their online reviews. It's the client of ours. And they did say candidates are bringing it up in interviews, their online reputation on Indeed and Glassdoor, they're bringing it up. So this is becoming... I think a lot more people are becoming aware of how this is affecting them. You guys help with improving reviews, that's what Rhino Reviews is all about, not just for products and widgets and selling of things, but also for helping online reviews like on Indeed and Glassdoor. Tell me about, what does that usually look like? What does a particular campaign look like? And then what are some expectations in terms of time?

Chelsea: Absolutely. I played sports growing up, so one of the analogies that we always use is you don't win games by playing defense. Yes, that's important, but you've got to play offense. You've got to score to win. And we use that analogy a lot when we talk with clients about the importance of proactively asking for reviews. Most people become aware of their reputation in one of two situations, the one that you just referenced, someone brings it up to them. And if they're bringing it up to you, again, it's not normally, "Wow, you have this great reputation," it's like, "Can you explain to me why the last five employees all referenced your lack of benefits or something like that?" Now you're on your heels as the interviewer, and it can be an uncomfortable position to be in.

Chelsea: The other situation that most clients bring up when they think about their reputation is if they are monitoring those platforms, they get the ping alert that a negative one just came through, and all of a sudden, now it's a fire. You're scrambling, you have no strategy, you're going, "We need five new reviews to make this one go away," but that doesn't work, you can't... Employees and customers are smart, if someone goes on your platform and they see you have three bad reviews in a row, and then all of a sudden on the same date, you get five 5-star reviews that say only rainbows and butterflies about your business, that's red flags. So those are the situations the most customers come to us in. What we do is we really help clients come up with proactive strategies so that they're never in those situations.

Chelsea: Yes, negative reviews are going to come. It's the world that we live in nowadays, but we'll handle, we'll manage those when those happen. But the important thing is you beat that by getting the consistent positive reviews. Studies have actually shown that if you have one or two negative reviews, that only validates that those positive ones that you have are actually real. So a negative review isn't the end of the world as long as it's handled, managed correctly, and you have the positive ones to outnumber it. One of our biggest advantages is a lot of these businesses, again, they have a million things on their plate, which is why they're not monitoring and managing this so we like to take that off their plate. We work with them as if we're an employee or a department of that business, and handle 100% of not only creating and coming up with a strategy, but the full execution of it.

Chelsea: The typical processes that we put in play are getting an understanding of what's going on in their business in the first place, kind of like a pulse on their teams. Are there things that went on that maybe your team really isn't in a great position right now? Did you have to let a department go? All those changes that might cause unrest and unsettlement amongst the teams. Get an understanding of that, but really help come up with the strategy where we're proactively asking for these reviews, asking for this feedback, both from a public standpoint. So let's get them on Indeed and Glassdoor if they're happy. But what also ends up happening is this becomes an opportunity for your employees to express if there is something going on in the workplace that they're not pleased with, and get you that valuable feedback that you as an employer want to know and need to know to really improve that overall culture.

Justin: So you have the system for capturing negative feedback. Tell me about that.

Chelsea: Yeah, so we work to, again, facilitate getting those positive reviews on Indeed and Glassdoor and those are the two ones for employers. Sometimes people ask for Google, that's for customers, you can't actually send employer reviews there. But to get those positive ones onto Indeed and Glassdoor, but again, so we do ask all... We send this to all employees. You can't screen employees because employees talk, and if you ask five people for a review and three people not, that's going to create issues and concern amongst the teams. So you do need to ask all employees. As the employer, that might be a little bit daunting because you might know this department or these individuals aren't happy, I don't want to send them to those platforms.

Chelsea: We still need to ask them for these reviews, so we have a process that is able to kind of sort those situations out and gather that private feedback from that employee where they're able... It's a win-win across the board. They're able to vent, they're able to say what's going on, provide you that feedback as a business. You're able to get that feedback and no one's blasting that on your Glassdoor and indeed. We at least view it as a win-win across the board.

Justin: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, what are some expectations? Let's say somebody decides to work with you, and viewers should know we work together, you and I, in the business and you're one of our amazing contractors and help us fulfill these online review requests from clients. But what are some expectations someone should have if they hire us or they hire you directly on the timing of a campaign and then the results from the campaign? What do you typically there?

Chelsea: Yeah, we expect to deliver you 500 five star reviews in a week. The reason I want to mention that is because it is very important to stress that if anyone ever guarantees you they can do something like that, you need to go the other way, because you're going to put your profile at risk. There's a lot of articles that have recently come out about companies getting in some serious trouble, not only losing their profiles online, but actually getting fined because it's incredibly illegal to post fake reviews up there. So everything we are doing is real, authentic, genuine reviews from your employees. So with that, I can never guarantee you're going to get this amount of reviews per week. We do have strategies, we have tactics, we've obviously had proven success and things that we recommend. But our typical kind of campaign timeline, it is a multi-week, multi-month process. The first month, we're typically working with you to just clean up your platforms.

Chelsea: A lot of the times going through claiming and I know you and I have really battled with that, but claiming and just getting access to some of the listings, making sure that we, when these new reviews are posted, have access to them so that we can respond to the reviews, both the positive and the negative. That's a huge piece of it. Claiming the profiles, updating them. These profiles online, it's a digital conversation nowadays, it's how people talk. One of the other things that these profiles are doing is they're building trust between you and that prospective employee. When things aren't... We have all these subconscious cues when we look online about trust with businesses, so we're going through and we're making sure, is your logo the same? Is your website updated? Is your About Us filled out? Do you have photos on your profile showing your culture events? Do you have your awards there? So really just kind of fully building out your online profiles there, because again, a lot of these get neglected.

Chelsea: The other thing we do is we go in and respond to all previously written reviews. Yes, the response is not going to be for that employee. Most of the time that employee is a former employee, so it doesn't even matter. Where it does matter is for those prospective employees who are looking at your profile and they're seeing, "Okay, they actually pay attention to what their teams are saying. They're actually reading this feedback. They actually care." So we're going through and putting those responses in there, basically just making sure that your profile and everything online is presented in the best light for things that we can control. While we're doing that, we're also working with you to build out these campaigns, figuring out the best time to distribute them.

Chelsea: How are we communicating these to your teams? Do you have a message board that we can let them know something like this is happening on? Maybe you do quarterly meetings where we can make these announcements. Understanding what is the division of your a company look like, do you have different departments? Are we going to segment them by department? Or maybe we're segmenting them on "you've been with us for 90 days, you've been with us for six months, you've been with us for a year plus." Just trying to understand what's unique about your business and how are we going to do this in the most effective way possible?

Justin: Yeah, that makes sense.

Chelsea: So our favorite part, because it's unique for every different client, customized solution. It's always a little challenging, there's different nuances, but it's fun.

Justin: You mentioned updating the profiles on these places and adding photos and things like that, why would that matter to the average person who says, "Well, I don't have time for that"? Why should that be something they reconsider?



Chelsea: Yeah, your online profile is your new business card, it's a reputation, it's people essentially walking into your business. If you have an employee coming in for an interview and they walk into your business lobby, I doubt you have an empty lobby with no chairs, no photos, no you know? You wouldn't have that. And your online profile these days, that's how we view these things. That's how we're judging businesses. It's no different than a website. You know, you want to make sure your website looks good because that's someone's first impression of you.

Chelsea: If you're posting job applications and job postings on these sites, the first thing someone does is they go to your page. If your page isn't updated, if your page isn't there, I'm not taking that next step. The other reason that it's even more heightened is COVID, once again. The past three years have been very wild from a business perspective. If you haven't put up updates within the past three years, I'm sitting wondering, are they even in business? Are they even still alive and around? But yeah, I mean, it's incredibly important, it's that first impression. And whether you want to accept that or not, it is what it is now.

Justin: It is. Right. Yeah, I make a really good point about COVID changing everything; how we interact with businesses. It's going to become more of the norm, especially with every younger generation that appears that online is the first and only maybe impression somebody will have until they show up, maybe even to their first day of work. I mean, with everything happening online, even online interviews. There's a very good chance their first day of work could be the first day they show up for you, so it's important. I like the analogy you used just, like it's a lobby for your business. That's really good. I might use that. I might use that.

Chelsea: Go for it.

Justin: What are some really good stories you could tell us about how this works? How this helps employers? Any wins you've seen in the past.

Chelsea: Yeah, I think that it's always... The ones that stand out to me are always the unexpected wins. Where obviously we're going into this with a reason of why we're doing it as well as the business, and when you reveal something or discover something that you weren't really expecting to be there. There's two kinds of case studies that jump with that and the first is obviously the positive one; working with clients that are very hesitant to ask for reviews. As the business owners, it's a vulnerable state to be in, especially when it's an owner operator business, because you put your heart and soul in this and employees are tough. Receiving critical feedback as a business owner is scary and that's hard to swallow, so a lot of the times we find that businesses don't ask for reviews because they're just scared of getting negative, because that's all they've seen. Well, of course that's all you've seen because the only people that go write reviews are the upset employees. You know, organically written reviews are never someone going, "Wow, I love my job. Let me take 10 minutes to do this."

Justin: Wouldn't that be nice if more people did.

Chelsea: Right? Oh, if only. Actually it wouldn't be nice, my job wouldn't exist.

Justin: You wouldn't have a job.

Chelsea: But it's always disgruntled, its own always upset former employees. They've actually had a statistic and I can't recall the exact number, I'll have to find it for you. But Glassdoor ran a statistic about, it was over 50% of the reviews written are former employees less than one year tenure. So it's all these people that were in or out, something went wrong right at the beginning and they're just pissed off so they go on. Getting that, because I'm clearly passionate about this, I'll go off on tangents all day. So you have these owner operators that all they know are these negative upset reviews so they've never asked for any. So working with them, getting them to trust our process, getting them to trust that this can and will work.

Chelsea: That they have a business because they clearly have happy employees, we just got to give them the tools to post the reviews. So when you have businesses like that, we can tell they're a little bit hesitant and coming back to them after our first month's results from the campaign and showing them this great feedback that their employees have posted. I mean, you can visibly see the stress go out of their face, they're trying to be humble but they're so... It's rewarding to read that feedback, so I love those moments. The other valuable moments might be a little harder to take. But as I mentioned, we have the tools to allow those employees to provide negative feedback without it being online. When we're working with the employers, again, it can be hard to receive that critical feedback. It can be hard to take it and sort through sometimes the exaggeration that the employees get and understand, okay, there is something critical here that we can use to improve upon our company and this is an opportunity.

Chelsea: But uncovering sometimes, and I mean, we've had a couple situations where we uncovered issues that the upper management was not aware of that were real credible issues. And they were able to go back to their teams and say, "We've heard you, we've solved this, we fixed it." And then what was even more exciting was following months, we ran the campaigns again the next quarter, and having people post positive reviews referencing that. You want to talk about as a prospective employee, reading a review saying, "Hey, I had an issue, I brought it to management, they solved this and I'm so excited." That is a killer review to receive.

Justin: Amazing, yeah.

Chelsea: And kudos to those businesses for understanding and being open to that feedback.

Justin: Right, having the courage to face it and not get offended, and then do something about it. That is a rarity I will say, but yeah, kudos to those. So thank you for sharing those stories. I'm going to ask you a couple, three more questions here. Three of these are more personal. Well, two are personal to you and your passion for the business, and then one is a quick win for viewers. So the first question is what's one thing you wished more people knew about online reviews that just nobody seems to get?

Chelsea: A lot of it comes from they think... One thing I wish that businesses knew about their online reviews and platforms is whether they want to be there or not, they are. And deciding we don't want to... You mentioned even earlier, but what about businesses that don't want to take the time to update their photos or build out their profiles because they don't think it matters? Whether you do or don't you're on those platforms. Customers and employees can create those platforms for you, so by ignoring it or saying, "We're not going to look at it," you're doing yourself an even bigger disservice. At the bare minimum, just go and claim it so you can be aware of what's happening. But a lot of businesses say, "Oh, well, we don't have a profile because we've never built it. We don't want to be there." That's not how this works.

Justin: No. Okay. What makes you just mad when it comes to online reviews?

Chelsea: What makes me very mad? There's quite a few. So that's a load.

Justin: All right, you can share a couple of few. What's one thing?

Chelsea: Yeah, I think sometimes... We work very intimately with our clients and so I know how much these affect some of the business owners. I know, I mean, they are people. At the end of the day, sometimes seeing what employees put out there, that's just clearly slander and clearly just meant to maliciously hurt this business. I mean, in a weird way, it's like the social media people that troll you and just say stuff to say stuff and forget there's a person behind there and you are hurting this business, which you're hurting the livelihood of people. That sometimes is just... I mean, you read some of this stuff, you know the people, they give you their side of the situation. I think sometimes the inability while I understand the reasoning of the platforms to not let you be able to just go in and remove a review. I think sometimes the fact that we really... There's things out there that are just blatant lies and as a business, unfortunately, you've got to just go and respond and move on.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, you bring up a memory I have of a client. We were onboarding a client a while back and I was really hesitant to talk with them because of their online reviews. You know, a promotion being a promotion company, employer branding company, we only want to work with employers who demonstrate they care for the people. Online reviews are really throwing me for a loop before I started working with them. So it's like, I don't know. And you go in, you talk with them and you realize, "Wow, they're doing things no other employer is doing."

Justin: There's evidence of how they're taking care of their people. So there's this disconnect between the online reviews and what's going on inside the business in terms of how the employees are respected and cared for. So yeah, it definitely can be even to the point of slander where it's really throwing people off and really offensive to the businesses and makes sense. So one last question for you, Chelsea. Somebody watching this, what's a quick win you can... What's a quick tip you could give them to get started with online reviews for their business?

Chelsea: Yeah. I think if they haven't yet, it's that first of all, Google yourself, see what's out there. I would go through the first three pages, and any platform or profile that's on those first three pages, make sure it's claimed, make sure you have ownership of it, go through that process. Because the first is awareness, figuring out what's even going on, what conversation is happening out there. And then from that, you can take action.

Justin: Have the courage to Google yourself and then look at the top three pages and claim the profiles you see out there. Okay, great tip. Thank you, Chelsea and thank you for meeting with me and talking about online reviews and how they relate to employer branding. Appreciate it.

Chelsea: Of course, thank you for having me. This is great.