First published on the Glassdoor for Employers blog at https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/employers/clearscore/.
At ClearScore we love data. Since I joined the company unfamiliar acronyms like ‘UMARUs’ and ‘PUDL’ have bounded into my life like enthusiastic but confusing labradoodles. While data drives nearly every business decision we make, when recruiting in a fiercely competitive market we need tools that allow us to blend emotion with hard data.
Glassdoor has a suite of capabilities it offers in-house recruiters, beyond merely functioning as a research tool for prospective job applicants. Its focus on transparency and openness mirrors ClearScore’s mission to inject clarity and control into the world of credit scoring and personal finance, but this isn’t the whole story.
Without impacting or influencing this transparency, employers have a surprising degree of control over their Glassdoor profile. This includes the content on the landing page – company description, photos etc. – and like LinkedIn there’s the ability to post updates. It even (if you subscribe) functions like a “free” job board that most ATSs can post jobs onto. Which is where it gets interesting.
Having reviewed our sourcing data for the last 18 months, we’ve seen that applicants who apply through Glassdoor (i.e. click on a job vacancy directly from our Glassdoor page rather than going from there to our website) are 20% more likely to receive a job offer than applicants who apply through other free job boards. They tend to be better-suited to the roles they apply for and better prepared for our interview process. This greater efficiency afforded to in-house recruiters is invaluable when time is at a premium.
This is relatively minor, however, compared to the part Glassdoor plays in the applicant journey as a whole. While the majority of candidates who apply to ClearScore via external job boards will check us out on Glassdoor on their way through the process, the same doesn’t apply the other way around. The company’s strong presence on Glassdoor, particularly the blend of mostly positive reviews and especially our CEO Justin’s personal responses to the occasional negative review, played a central part in convincing me that this was the right opportunity when I applied. Best of all, because of Glassdoor’s transparency, this impression was accurate: I’ve found life at ClearScore to be just as good as I expected, and I feel I went in already aware of the company’s growing pains and the steps it was taking to address these.
Glassdoor tracks total impressions month by month, allowing these to be correlated with PR and tactics such as recruitment events and their effectiveness (in terms of impressions and applications) measured and compared historically. ClearScore’s product, as well as the company’s success, are built on the premise that “What can be measured can be improved”, and with ambitious plans to rapidly scale our team both in the UK and overseas over the next six months this ability to monitor the effectiveness with which our message is broadcast is a key part of our hiring strategy.
Finally, Glassdoor affords employers a measure of control over the nature of this message. As a Glassdoor partner we have a dedicated account manager on hand to answer queries and offer advice on how to optimise our profile, and ensure that our employer brand is communicated clearly through an increasingly important channel.
All in all, it’s tough to recruit in the modern world without a well-curated Glassdoor profile, and the more internal recruiters engage with the platform the more they can gain from it. It’s well-placed to provide the hard data behind subjective questions like “How well are we perceived by jobseekers?”, something any rapidly-scaling company needs to know.
Dan McEvoy 