CEOs are increasingly alarmed about their reviews on Glassdoor and other employer review sites, and how it affects their careers and recruiting prospects. We’ve dubbed this phenomenon Glassdoor angst. And if you’re embarrassed by those reviews, it’s easy to overreact. Who likes being made profoundly uncomfortable by someone anonymously bashing your organization? No one wants to have their staffing affected because of some disgruntled former or current employees.

So here are a few articles we thought provided some useful perspective and advice about what to do to improve those negative Glassdoor reviews. (Glassdoor also offers an entire category to deal with this exact concern):

  1. 5 CEO Responses on Glassdoor Worth Reading – Glassdoor’s own Employers blog is actually a great resource, which makes sense – they don’t want to be a curse word in executives’ mouths. (They also offer a number of products and services, which the regular users don’t pay for.) So if you’re a little lost on where to begin, here are 5 ways certain CEOs chose to respond to negative reviews, in a way that didn’t come across as canned and inauthentic. Also included: basic strategy advice for your company’s responses. For example: the higher up the org chart a responder is, the more legitimate the response seems.
  2. 5 Tips to Turn Around or Turn Up Your Glassdoor Ratings – Fairly similar advice to the above article. But it also includes some ideas about how to better implement your response system. And if you’re in the lucky few companies who have great Glassdoor reviews, you’ll find some useful advice on how to leverage that fact.
  3. Glassdoor Outpaces CareerBuilder in U.S. Traffic – To give some perspective on how big Glassdoor actually is at this point – according to ComScore traffic reports, it’s now one of the top 4 largest job sites in the US. Not only that, it’s the fastest growing among the big 5 career sites (LinkedIn, Indeed, CareerBuilder, and Monster). If you were ignoring it until it was a bigger deal, that ship has sailed.
  4. How Negative Online Company Reviews Can Impact Your Business and Recruiting – 88% of people claim they have been influenced by an online review (for anything, not just companies). By not taking charge of your negative reviews where you can, you make it that much more clear to job-seekers how true the allegations are.

Finally, remember that many job-seekers will take Glassdoor reviews with a grain of salt.  The content is still important, and can be very useful for job-seekers – they might use the complaints to ask some probing, smart questions about your organization that you might be unprepared for.

For more on this topic, read How Employer Reputation Affects Senior Executive Careers, or download our Viewpoint Document on The Glassdoor Impact.