How Jennifer Newbill, Director of Employer Brand at Dell, increased reviews on Glassdoor

And then check out either part 1 here or the full interview here.

Full Transcript

Jennifer: Not controlling the message I think is the part of Glassdoor that kind of scares people. I think most large enterprise companies, especially those that have a robust recruitment marketing or employment brand team have kind of gotten over that, right? But it took a lot of convincing and there were some companies as recently as 2015-2016, you know, friends of mine in the industry that would say like, "what did you do at Dell because you talk about Glassdoor a lot and it sounds like your leaders are really comfortable with it, mine aren't." One of the things that happened in about the 2013 time frame is employers were able to respond to reviews and that's where you could become what they called an "open company." And so that was something we definitely wanted to jump on because not only did we want to create this transparency with our employees and with our candidates and talk about it very openly but we wanted to demonstrate to the candidates as well "we're listening to you and here's the response." So I'll give you just a quick example for your listeners. So we had somebody, some of the reviews honestly are funny. I was entertained quite a bit reading. I used to read Glassdoor almost daily. And one of them was pretty funny. And this guy's like, "oh, you know, Dells pretty cool whatever but it's a cube farm. It's a depressing cube farm." Well we've actually been going through, for several years, an amazing facilities transformation. And we had written a recent blog post, you know, one of our leaders in facilities was talking about the financial investment that was being made, they had some pictures of some of the offices that had seen some of the transformation. So I was able to respond and say, "you know what, we agree cubes suck, right? But read this blog post." And it was an external blog post, it was on Direct to Dell, which is our external blog post. So not only could this gentleman see that (because some employees miss some of our blog posts, right? We're a big company). Hey, reminder we're going through this facility's transformation anybody that's maybe reading my response could also say, "what are they doing at Dell? how are they getting away from like the cube farm?" So you're responding to the employee and then if you have these 5,000 views maybe people are actually clicking that link and checking it out. So it's not about arguing, you know, the person's experience because the person's experience is real. He was probably sitting in a cube farm at that time. But it's about just informing and educating them around, "we hear you, we value what you're saying, and by the way this is something that we're changing."

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