– by Ainsley Lawrence

– Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer with an interest in the way business, technology, and education intersect with the personal. She loves traveling to beautiful places and is frequently lost in a good book.

Your employees are among the most important resources your business has. When you gain and engage the right workforce, they have the potential to function efficiently, boost your industry profile, and innovate on your behalf. Of course, attracting the attention of these high-quality workers can be challenging.

There have been significant shifts in the employment landscape as of late. Potential workers are — rightly — very selective about the companies they dedicate their time and talents to. As such, it’s important to demonstrate your high value as an employer. Referrals, reviews, and testimonials can play a key role here.

Why Referrals, Reviews, and Testimonials Matter

There are likely to be a range of steps you’re currently taking to demonstrate that your business is a preferred employer. So, why should referrals, reviews, and testimonials attract more of your time and investment? Well, these resources can be invaluable for a variety of reasons.

These include:

Reputation Management

The state of your company’s reputation has a significant impact on your company’s success. Reviews, referrals, and testimonials support reputation management practices that improve your credibility, increase loyalty, and enhance brand value. When your employees recommend your business to other candidates, there’s a cache that comes from personal experience. Reviews from customers and workers give candidates insights into the culture of your company. These elements build a story about your reputation that influences the quality of your applicants.

Trust Signal Communication

Candidates in the current climate are pretty savvy. They’re familiar with the tactics of brand marketing and may be slightly more cynical when faced with materials from the company itself claiming that they’re an employer of choice. Reviews, referrals, and testimonials, on the other hand, tend to be more independent in nature. As a result, they can be useful ways to communicate trust signals about the quality of your business as an employer.

Understanding Choice Components

Before you’re able to utilize your referrals, reviews, and testimonials effectively, you need to understand what makes a business and employer of choice. On the most basic level, this refers to how desirable you are to job seekers, which can influence the quality of candidates you’re likely to attract. You’ll also generally find that offering solid growth opportunities and employee recognition programs plays a role in your status.

However, it’s also important to dive deeper than the broader components of being a preferred employer. Each industry, role type, target demographic, and even geographical area is likely to have a varied range of nuanced elements talented employees look for beyond salary. Take the time to issue surveys to your staff about their experiences and what keeps them engaged with your business. Perform targeted market research on the cultural aspects and benefits that impact retention and recruitment in your sector.

From here you can start to match the most relevant referrals, reviews, and testimonials to meet your needs. Run extensive crawls on review websites and social media for specific keywords related to the components you’ve found suggest you’re an employer of choice. When requesting feedback from current and former workers, provide surveys that offer scoring and qualitative responses in subject areas that are relevant to the characteristics you need to promote, alongside more generalized elements.

Utilizing a Range of Tools

So, once you’ve identified the components of being a preferred employer and found relevant reviews, how do you proceed? The good news is that there are various tools on the market at the moment that you can use to leverage feedback and recommendations to influence recruitment. It’s worth leaning into the tools that closely meet your needs and increase your reach.

Some key tools include:

Recruitment Services

Professional recruitment services can be your most direct route to quality candidates. At American Recruiters, our Direct Hire service uses recruiting methodologies to help you connect with great prospects even if they aren’t actively looking for a new position. It can certainly help when businesses meaningfully collaborate on these efforts. Providing recruiters with access to your relevant reviews and testimonials may be an influencing factor in convincing candidates to join your organization.

Marketing Channels

Perhaps the most agile tools for utilizing your reviews, referrals, and testimonials are your marketing channels. Ensure that your website careers pages include up-to-date copies of reviews and testimonials. Build social media content around what people have said about your brand as an employer, followed by recruitment calls-to-action (CTAs). Incorporate your employee referral program into your email marketing systems so that recommended candidates receive their first communication from the company with links to reviews and reputation-strengthening content.

Conclusion

Referrals, reviews, and testimonials can be useful tools in highlighting your status as a preferred employer for candidates. Their independent nature and positive tone can effectively function as components of reputation management as well as send trust signals to a savvy candidate base. It’s important to get to know the general characteristics that make you a choice employer as well as more nuanced elements, so you can identify the most impactful resources. From here, it’s vital to use a range of tools to ensure your reviews, referrals, and testimonials connect with their target audience.

Additionally, you should be mindful of how frequently the employment landscape changes. Make sure you regularly assess reviews for relevance and identify new tech platforms that can help communicate your testimonials to candidates. With consistent effort, your business can benefit from engaged and skilled workers.