Why Investing in Your Online Reputation Benefits Your Recruiting Strategy

We’ve entered a time when online reviews, peer ratings, and testimonials play a critical role in shaping people’s perceptions. For staffing firms, your online reputation will be central to your recruitment brand positioning in the long haul.  

If you’re already delivering stellar candidate experience and making long-term placements, then your next step is making sure that your potential clients and candidates know that. How well you build your reputation today will significantly impact how people will see your brand tomorrow. 

The question is, how are you building up your online reputation? 

Why You Should Invest in Online Reputation 

It’s no secret that in the staffing world, reputation is everything.   

Think about it: all it takes is one Google search to discover your brand.  

Although managing an online reputation may sound like a taxing endeavor due to the vastness of the digital world, it’s actually a great opportunity to showcase the best of your staffing firm. You can draw in more candidates when you have excellent recruitment marketing strategies in place. 

Why? Because you can control the story that you write on your social handles and website, which makes your online reputation one of the best recruitment marketing tools at your disposal. 

Don’t believe us? Check out these proof points.¹ 

• Before sending in their application, 52% of candidates take the time to visit your social media sites and website to know you more.  
• Staffing firms that invest in their recruitment brand can make quality placement twice faster than those that don’t.  
• Cost per hire is decreased by half, and turnover rates are reduced by 28% because of a strong recruitment brand. 

What these numbers tell us: a strong online reputation can positively impact your business in many ways. It starts with attracting quality candidates who will yield the most return-of-investment for your clients, translating to more chances of building candidate and client loyalty. This process also leads to more business for your staffing firm in the next year or more.   

Rinse and repeat, the cycle of good business goes on and on.  

CREATE A STRONG ONLINE REPUTATION THAT WILL MAKE YOU A RECRUITER OF CHOICE 

Building your online reputation is no small undertaking, so it’s important that you execute good recruitment marketing strategies to reap optimal results. 

Here’s are four practices you can do to create a strong online reputation. 

Build a candidate experience that genuinely values applicants, and tell your story with authenticity. 

The foundation of a good recruitment brand is an outstanding candidate experience. You can’t promote something you’re not, so making it a point to genuinely value your candidates is the first step to building a well-rounded online reputation. Once you’ve got the groundwork laid out, then tell your story with authenticity – a true, honest, and accurate depiction of what you’re staffing firm is.   

Define your brand values and translate your vision into your communication. To do this:  

• Benchmark your competitor positioning and differentiate yourself. To showcase what’s unique about you, you need to first know what everyone else is doing. From there, identify the traits that make your staffing firm special. 

• Work on a good Candidate Value Proposition. What will candidates get in return for partnering with you? Your value proposition will attract the right candidates who share the same goal as you, but make sure that you don’t over glamorize or water down your recruitment culture. 
• Reflect your values from assessment all the way to the job offers. Consistency is vital in building a strong recruitment brand. This means that your recruitment process, communication, and overall approach should be aligned with your message. If you’re selling yourself as a firm that offers long-term value, then your recruitment process should be efficient, your candidate experiences personal, and your placements spot on. 

The key here is building emotional connections and giving candidates something to relate with and be passionate about.² An authentic brand is a brand that candidates will trust better. 

Let your previous successes do the talking for you. 

Let the human side of your recruitment brand shine by demonstrating how you steward relationships well and help people grow in their careers—no better way to do this than through user-generated content like candidate and client testimonials. 

Your successful placements are the best source of social proof for building a good online reputation and getting the word out organically. A good recommendation is not to be underestimated, especially since candidates regard their fellow candidates’ opinions as three times more trustworthy than any corporate marketing effort.³ So, turn your successful placements into your ambassadors and let them do the talking for you. 

All it takes is proactively capturing their feedback and converting them into testimonials. The best part, you can automate this so you don’t break a sweat as you build your online reputation. There is plenty of online reputation management software available to do the tedious work for you, so you can focus on ensuring that the candidate experience you deliver reinforces your marketing efforts. 

Respond to negative reviews, and own your mistakes. 

Consistently acknowledging and responding to negative candidate feedback is basically your recruitment brand values in action. You promote authenticity and show it by taking every bad review with a grain of salt and humility.  

Transparency is exemplified when you make an effort to let them know what happened and what you’re doing to make things right. Moreover, you gain trust and respect when candidates see that you treat people as humans enough to care about their opinions, no matter how unpleasant they may be. 

So, don’t dismiss negative reviews in staffing. Instead, seize the opportunity to show that when it comes to your recruitment brand, you say what you mean and mean what you say.  

Maintain an active social media presence. 

Did you know that the number one challenge for candidates when job hunting is the lack of information about recruiters and their client companies?⁴  

Maintaining your social media presence is one of the best ways to shape your online reputation. When you continually put out consistent and compelling content, you provide the best information about you that candidates can get their hands on. These initiatives also help you gain an opportunity to actively engage candidates through helpful content that cements you as an expert in the industry – the best possible choice for them. 

The trick is to feed your readers with content that is relevant and interesting to your target market. First, do some research and find out what your audience is asking about, then provide them with the answers to their questions in line with your recruitment brand messaging. Next, diversify your content to make it valuable and engaging. Consider putting out how-to guides, job hunting tips, or recruitment trends from which job hunters can benefit. 

Then, experiment with the following formats, and check the analytics result to see what works best for you:  

• Infographics  
• Blog posts 
• Videos 
• Podcasts 

• Webinars 

Lastly, remember that you can be as creative as you like. The main point is to ensure that your content provides value to your readers and fastens your reputation as an expert in the staffing industry. 

SOLIDIFY YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION AS A GREAT RECRUITER 

With Great Recruiter’s reputation management software, you can be at the driver’s seat when it comes to building your recruitment brand. Our online reputation management software automatically captures candidate feedback and provides you with data that can give your team insights into what candidates want so they can deliver above and beyond their expectations.