Employer Branding Summit 15

On Friday, September 25, 2015, Glassdoor hosted its second annual employer branding summit. For those unable to attend the event, Glassdoor offered a live stream which was recorded. Videos of the presentations are available on YouTube and the presentation materials have been posted on SlideShare. Below is a recap of the first three presentations. Future posts will recap the remaining presentations.

 

Glassdoor for Employers YouTube main link
Glassdoor for Employers SlideShare main link
Twitter hashtag: #GDSummit

 

 

Welcome Address

Robert Hohman, CEO, Glassdoor
(video – 19:00) (SlideShare)

 

Robert Holman, CEO, Glassdoor kicked off the conference with a presentation on the importance of an employer brand. “Employer branding is more than a business or marketing decision, it’s a human decision.”

 

Your employer brand impacts both the company and its employees. According to the Edelman “trustbarometer,” 1/3 of all respondents say employees are their most trusted source of information about a company.

 

“Employer branding is critical as transparency is the new normal.” It determines whether employers want to work with you and if those outside of the organization, i.e., investors, partners, vendors, etc., want to do business with you. Trip Advisor, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, and Zillow are examples of how transparency is impacting businesses. Each of these sites provides rich feedback.

 

People want insight and are willing to share with others in order to get it in turn. People help other people make better decisions.

 

“Glassdoor delivers 2x better applicant quality compared to traditional job boards.” It takes half as many resumes to get to a hire because applicants can determine whether a particular company is a good fit for them.  And with 30 million unique users a month, Glassdoor is the fastest growing job site in the US.

 

“The human aspect of brand is impacting how effective you are at recruiting.”

 

With a strong employer brand, companies can actually pay less to get more productive people. The flip side is that you’ll pay a premium for people if you employer brand isn’t strong.

 

 

 

Keynote Presentation: Transparent Leadership

Spencer Rascoff, Zillow Group)
(Video – 29:35) (SlideShare)

 

One of the CEOs responsibilities is employer branding.

 

“What does a CEO do?

According to Fred Wilson, Venture Capitalist, CEOs have 3 priorities:

  1. Set over all vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders.
  2. Recruit, hire, and retain the very best talent for the company.
  3. Make sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”

 

Zillow focuses on empowerment, accessibility, and honesty

 

Empowerment

  • Mission-driven. What do you stand for? Everyone at Zillow recites the mission at the beginning of every meeting.
  • Core Values: Zillow waited 3-4 years before they defined their core values and they are woven into all parts of the organization.
  • Common language: Established buyer personas. This provides a short cut in discussions where new features or products are debated.
  • Plays: The entire company rallies around a single focused effort for 6 months to 1 year. It becomes the overarching focus.
  • Hack Weeks to encourage innovation. Then follow through to incorporate the innovations and celebrate the contributions of the week.
  • Interaction: Removed all doors and sometimes chairs. No offices at Zillow.
  • Perks: Types of perks say a lot about a company. Always be aware of how perks are perceived.
  • Decision-making: To understand a company, you must consider how decisions are made and how resources get allocated. Zillow Group is a Consensus driven data meritocracy.

 

Accessibility

  • Being a Social CEO: listen, make sure people can find you and that you are where the conservations are happening. Use social to interact with employees and to engage investors.
  • Use events to position company as a leader.
  • Everything ties back to recruiting.

 

Honesty (Authenticity)

  • Hard to recreate another company’s culture: Share what the company is doing around its mission, vision, core values, etc.
  • Know yourself as a CEO and know when you need to change.
  • Use your bench: Focus on what you are great at and let others do what they are good at.

 

And that’s the “full formula to being a transparent CEO.”

 

 

 

CEO Fireside Chat

Spencer Rascoff, Zillow Group and Robert Hohman, CEO, Glassdoor
(Video – 31:29)

 

This segment featured a Q&A session with Spencer Rascoff and Robert Holman.

 

How do you use the feedback from Glassdoor? 

Zillow uses a person to triage the feedback and then that person sends the feedback to one of 5 executives who have the responsibility to respond.  This feedback process has to be a focus of the CEO. It takes humility to approach comments – especially negative ones. Acknowledge apologize and respond to negative feedback.

 

Tom Larkin research: People have been trained to consume online reviews. They classify online reviews into 3 categories: the crazies; personal stories don’t match their experience; and the  common thread.

 

Outside companies use Glassdoor information too because it gives window into the soul of the company. Investors, partners, vendors and recruiters are examples.

 

Setting realistic expectations is a key to preventing negative feedback.

You want to meet or exceed people’s expectations. The problems come when the expectations are not met.  At the 12:50 marks of the video, new hire employee expectations are discussed. Mr. Rascoff stated that a company’s mission and culture are only things that are important. Mr. Holman agreed. It seemed that they were dismissing the other aspects of employee engagement.

 

 

 

 

How use Glassdoor analytics to make case in favor of establishing an employer brand to senior leadership?

One measure is the volume of people researching their company.    Mr. Rascoff mentioned that if senior leadership believes that talent is important, they immediately jump directly to compensation as an assumed means of retention.  Autonomy, mastery, purpose, and mission are the most important to employees if they feel they are fairly compensated.

 

How handle CEO resistance to focusing on the employer brand?

If the CEO isn’t onboard, go to marketing as a workaround Do not go to finance because creating and employer brand costs money! Laugh. Employment and product brands are two strands of company DNA.

 

What advice do you have for companies that don’t want to respond to negative reviews?

You need to be part of the conversation. On Glassdoor, if someone posts a negative comment, the company gets to respond and that’s it. There is no back and forth to worry about.

 

Who owns employer branding?

For both Zillow and Glassdoor, HR and Marketing own employer branding. Employer branding cannot be siloed in HR.

 

 

What are your thoughts on these presentations? What was your key takeaway from each presentation? Stay tuned for part 2 of 4.

 

 

Let’s Engage!

I’m Agent in Engagement Simpson…Gregory F Simpson.

Employee engagement is a critical mission. I hope I can count on your help! Subscribe to the RSS Feed to receive the latest intelligence/insights and/or register to make entries in the comments log.

Photo of Gregory F SimpsonYou can follow me @agtinengagement.
Email me at g…@a…t.com.
Connect via LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/in/GregoryFSimpson.
Learn more about me at gregoryfsimpson.com.

 

 

 

P.S.  First contact? Welcome to the Agent In Engagement community. Explore and join fellow employee engagement operatives in targeting a known thief – alias: Disengagement. Together we can bring this thief to justice and make the world a better place for all companies and their employees.

Other recent Agent in Engagement data/reports by Agent Gregory F Simpson: