How does your employer's reputation affect your career? Executive recruiters know quite a bit more about that question than you might expect. 

We're in the room when hiring managers decide who to interview, so we know how outsiders perceive the people who work for your organization. It's common for hiring managers to attribute the company’s reputation to everyone who works there. We also conduct the social media background checks as part of our due diligence, so we know when your (formerly private) management matters become all-too-public.

Conversely, for you hiring managers reading, we know precisely how responsive candidates are to your job opportunities. We see first-hand how job seekers are more eager to respond to job opportunities from highly reputable organizations, and how they shy away from organizations with bad reviews on employer review sites. 

As hiring process experts, it's our job to know exactly how your Glassdoor score affects your abilty to recruit, and how your employer's current reputation will affect your own ability to land your next job. 

As it turns out, creating the perfect hiring process is fairly difficult. Who knew? Since 2007, we've been on a quest to bring you the most useful tools for every kind of hiring situation, and for every stage of the hiring process (including virtual interviews).

In other posts, we've examined the evolution of the executive search industry, and what services a modern search firm should offer. 

If you work in an association or other nonprofit organization, it’s risky to think of recruiting as an HR function. It’s not.

By telling HR to “Post a job ad, get some resumes, and then I’ll starting interviewing,” you are making a career-limiting mistake, one that puts your personal reputation at risk.

Your organization's reputation in hiring not only affects who you can recruit, but also the level of compensation you must offer to land your top candidate. (Highly reputable organizations can typically offer lower salaries.) And for job seekers, the reputation of their current organization is a significant factor in how future employers perceive them.

With the rise of employer reputation sites like Glassdoor, overwhelming dread has overcome HR and senior leadership -- a feeling of Glassdoor Angst. Anonymous reviewers are publicly posting "insider information" outside of management’s control.  In 2014, most CEOs we spoke with didn’t seem to know or care about Glassdoor. But now more than half of the CEOs we speak with mention their Glassdoor reviews in our first meeting.

Imagine if a vengeful IRS agent could levy three hefty new taxes against you -- taxes that apply only to your organization. You would mobilize everything you had to fight it. But a handful of toxic managers in your organization do this every day. The "toxic manager tax" has the same effect as polluter fines or carbon emissions tax -- money off the bottom line.

A few years ago, the caliber of your management team was not a public matter. Your internal disagreements stayed private. Outsiders rarely knew whether or not you had few bad apples on your leadership team.

Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen, resigned on Wednesday, in the wake of the widening scandal over faked emissions testing. The company admitted to installing software designed to evade air pollution standards in nearly half a million cars in the U.S. (and potentially 11 million cars worldwide).

Not long ago, most of my clients only had a vague idea what Glassdoor was all about. Now, in my first meetings with hiring executives, it’s rare for them not to bring up their employee reviews on career sites like Indeed and Glassdoor. In a small firm, particularly one where the CEO reports to a board of directors, online reviews get real personal, real fast. And the sudden onset of public accountability can give executives a severe case of Glassdoor Angst.

Current employees, disgruntled former employees, even job candidates who were not hired can go online to Glassdoor.com and anonymously post anything they feel like saying about your organization.

And they are. Glassdoor is now bigger than CareerBuilder, and it's the fastest-growing career site.

A year ago, most CEOs I spoke with didn’t seem to know or care about Glassdoor. But now more than half of the CEOs I speak with mention their Glassdoor reviews in our first meeting. They are all suffering from a case of sudden onset "Glassdoor angst" -- the kind of public accountability that makes most CEOs profoundly uncomfortable.