Following Glassdoor Acquisition, Indeed Embraces Employer Branding With New Report

When Glassdoor got gobbled up by Indeed’s parent company last week, I speculated that the two would eventually become one. If not one brand, I guessed they would at least start sharing content, resources, product offerings, employer platforms, and the like.

Some of this was supported last week when a source at a recruitment ad agency told me the following: “Indeed has been making their rounds through our offices over the last few weeks informing us of their new enhanced employee profile feature. I called them out and asked them why it looks so much like Glassdoor profiles. To which they responded that is exactly what they were going for.

“Further, they’re offering their new enhanced profile for completely free. All the meetings were completed prior to the acquisition of course and I’m fairly confident the Indeed team we visited didn’t know why they were doing it. Knowing this, I believe as you do, that at a future date the platforms will merge. Why else are they encouraging all clients to claim their new enhanced Indeed profile for free?”

Proof that Indeed is more aggressively embracing that Glassdoor life, it released its How Radical Transparency Is Transforming Job Search and Talent Attraction report, a survey of 500 job seekers in the U.S. “Today we live in an age of radical transparency. In our interconnected world we have almost instant access to a quantity of information that was unimaginable even a few years ago,” said Paul Wolfe, head of global HR at Indeed in a blog post.

The report is full of interesting findings — if employer branding is your cup of tea — and shows just how focused Indeed is on encouraging companies to own their brand, and do it on Indeed’s platform, primarily through their Company Pages. Read all the findings, but if you’re pressed for time, here are the ones that stood out to me the most:

95 percent of respondents said that if they were considering a new job opportunity, insight into the company’s employer reputation would be somewhat (33 percent) or extremely (62 percent) important — the majority regarding it as extremely important.
Of millennials, 71 percent said transparency was “extremely important,”compared to 55 percent of baby boomers … and Gen Z won’t do without it.
Indeed asked workers to name the five most important considerations when researching a company before submitting an application. Stability won (47 percent), followed by insights around benefits and perks, flexibility, and salary ranges for relevant roles (45 percent). Next up was information about growth opportunities (41 percent), company management (34 percent) and the company’s mission and vision (31 percent).
Bad reviews are better than no reviews. Inadequate online presence provokes “automatic” distrust from 70 percent of job seekers. Nearly 3 in 5 (69 percent) agree that they would actually doubt that the job opportunity was even real, with almost 2 in 5 (37 percent) strongly agreeing with this sentiment. Less than a third (32 percent) of respondents said they somewhat distrust or strongly distrust a company with a negative online reputation.
Engagement brings rewards. Nearly three quarters of respondents said seeing responses from employers to negative reviews would change their minds. More than one third (36 percent) of workers surveyed said their perceptions of an employer would become much more positive, and 36 percent said their perceptions would become somewhat more positive if that employer responded to a negative review online.
Only salary info is more important than reviews. Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents named online company reviews by current and former employees as one of the most important factors for making this decision. Salary at 57 percent was first.

Few still doubt the important of online reviews when it comes to hiring, but as more and more numbers get published around this, employers can better manage and prioritize when it comes to brand management. A report by iCIMS last year was equally enlightening.

The report also gives Indeed a golden opportunity to promote its newly updated Company Pages. There are now two tabs Indeed users will notice. First, “Snapshot” provides job seekers with an at-a-glance view of what people are saying about the company. Second, “Why Join Us” is a landing page that employers control and can customize with videos, text, photos, social feeds, and company updates.

The update also includes a new subscription, Company Pages Premium (currently available in the U.S. only). This gives employers the ability to feature branded content and jobs to candidates based on their Indeed job searches, as well as enhanced analytics providing insights on how an employer’s brand is performing on particular metrics, such comparisons with competitors on salary and work-life balance. You can also filter and sort ratings and reviews by location and department.

If Glassdoor and Indeed remain separate, there’s a nice double-dipping scenario here, as companies will feel obligated to pay both vendors to manage their brand. Maybe they’ll figure out a discount to use both, or maybe they’ll have a single platform to manage both sites from one interface.

The more likely future, however, still points to a single site, which I think will be Indeed. The updates simply make it easier to maintain some consistency in companies and job seekers currently using Glassdoor to transfer over to Indeed. In a world of one-platform-to-rule-them-all, with Google, LinkedIn /Microsoft, and Facebook fighting for supremacy, a divided Indeed and Glassdoor simply cannot stand.