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Review-led Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding - Part 3: How to Use Campaigns to Get the Best Employee Reviews

Written by Content Marketing Specialist | January 5, 2023

To attract top candidates, improve retention and foster a positive company culture, you have to invest in your employer brand.

The Review-led Talent Acquisitions & Employer Branding Series is designed to guide human resources professionals in thinking about how to capitalize on the power of the employee voice by capturing and distributing their thoughts effectively in forward-thinking recruitment marketing tactics.

In part 3, we will discuss how Campaigns can be customized to help your company get more employee reviews. If you missed part 2, check out Internal use cases for Invite Video. 

Talent acquisition is a highly competitive industry. 77% of executives say hiring and retaining talent was their most critical growth driver in 2022. In today's job market especially, and with the rise of remote work, candidates have more options and influence than ever before, making it challenging to attract and retain top talent. 

As discussed in parts 1 & 2 of the Review-led Talent Acquisitions & Employer Branding series, employee reviews are a critical resource for job seekers and recruiters alike. They give valuable insight into your company culture and values and are the backbone of your employer brand. 

In order to attract top candidates and make your company stand out in a competitive hiring market, you need current and positive employee reviews. Invite Campaigns give you the ability to ask for feedback in a strategic way that will encourage more employee reviews while shaping how your company is marketed to top candidates. 

To learn more about the importance of employee reviews when it comes to the hiring and recruitment process, check out Review-led Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding - Part 1: How Glassdoor Reviews Build Trust for Job Seekers

What is an Invite Campaign? 

An Invite Campaign is an automated and targeted review generation strategy that ensures your customers (or for our purposes here, your prospective/current employees) receive review requests at the right time and with personalized messaging. It allows you to collect feedback intentionally and with specific goals and objectives in mind. 

For HR professionals especially, Invite Campaigns are useful in that they eliminate the tedious task of having to ask for reviews manually, allowing you to focus more time and energy on growing your business. They also give you the ability to be more deliberate in your recruitment marketing efforts, as they are completely customizable in the ways you can  reach your target audience (e.g. sending requests at specific times, to specific target groups, tailoring exactly what message they receive or prompt you want them to answer, etc. )

With an effective Invite Campaign strategy, recruiting marketers can essentially shape the employer brand by hand-picking what kind of feedback is being collected for distribution.

*Read more about the Campaigns and what they can do for your business here. 

How to Use Campaigns to Get More Reviews:

1. Decide your approach:

The first step in launching an automated review campaign is determining what review generation strategy works best for your business. Email and social media campaigns are both useful methods, but at Widewail we believe strongly in the power of SMS marketing

Texts have a 98% open rate. Cell phones are almost always on and within reach. Invite capitalizes on this by automatically sending SMS review requests on behalf of your business. This makes your review requests more likely to be seen and completed with as little friction as possible. 

Overall, Invite works to take the stress out of getting more reviews. Our set-it-and-forget-it software allows you to invest more hours into your primary job role while knowing you are maximizing your review volume potential.

2. Integrate:

Widewail integrates directly with your software to streamline the review generation process. It allows you to seamlessly target review requests and Campaigns, even if it’s directly to your team members. It’s as simple as connecting your company data flow, in this case, an employee database or HR software, and letting technology do the rest. 

3. Set Automation Triggers:

Have you just conducted a round of hiring? Send a review request to your newest team members. Is a current employee celebrating a work anniversary or a promotion? Send them a request. Invite gives you the flexibility to customize your review request triggers based on your business goals and interactions.

*Additionally, with Invite, you have the option to bulk upload contacts or send individual review requests manually via the Widewail app. This is useful when you have a specific list of people in mind that would have valuable input.

4. Build Your Campaign: 

As you work to get more employee reviews and strengthen your employer brand, you can use Invite to design an unlimited number of Campaigns to target and highlight the employee voice. You can set your Campaign to have unique audiences, trigger states, messaging, timing, review sites and expiration dates. This gives you the ability to reach both current and prospective employees and encourages them to share their individual experiences. 

There are many ways in which you can use Campaigns to encourage employees to share feedback and bolster your marketing strategy. A few examples include:

  • A recruitment event: Design a Campaign to send review requests to attendees. Ask them to review your application process/hiring approach on sites such as Glassdoor or Indeed. This gives you the chance to improve for future candidates. It also helps you leave a lasting impression on prospective employees, making your company more memorable when it comes time for them to accept an offer. 
  • Company announcements: Set up an internal Campaign to get feedback from current employees on new company policies/announcements. This will go a long way in making your team members feel heard and appreciated while encouraging a collaborative and open work environment. 
  • Performance reviews: Employees expect to hear from you at a performance review. Flip the script by launching a Campaign and asking your employees for feedback. Performance review season is a time for reflection. As you work with your employees to identify what they’re doing well/ways in which they can improve, ask them to do the same for you. This adds a level of reciprocity and trustworthiness to the review process.
  • Work anniversaries: The best insight into what it is like to work for your company comes from someone who has been with your company for at least a year. Use Campaigns to target these employees specifically and ask for their feedback. They know the ins and outs of your business, and they are acclimated in a way that makes their input more valuable. Featuring their voices will not only help you achieve your recruitment goals but also show your employees that their opinions matter. 

5. Monitor progress:

After setting up and launching a Campaign, the only thing left to do is sit back and watch the reviews flood in. With Widewail’s centralized app, you can keep track of high-level metrics such as the number of review requests sent, how many are opened, and how many were submitted. 

Tips for Asking for Employee Reviews

When it comes to generating employee reviews with Invite Campaigns, there are a few important things to keep in mind:

  1. Clarify to your employees that reviews are anonymous: Unlike customer review sites, employee review sites like Glassdoor are anonymous. This protects the privacy of your employees and encourages them to leave honest feedback without fear of it affecting their jobs.
  2. Don’t be too pushy: It’s great to ask your employees for reviews, but once you set up a Campaign and send a request, it’s out of your hands. Don’t pressure your employees to leave a review, ask whether or not they have submitted one, or force them to keep their feedback positive. This goes against Glassdoor policies and can result in reviews being deleted or account suspension.
  3. Prep your employees: when asking for a review, especially in a targeted or strategic way as with Campaigns, it’s crucial that your employees don’t feel forced or caught off guard. Explain to them ahead of time what you are planning on asking them in your review request to ensure they are comfortable with the process. A proper heads-up before receiving a text or email asking for a review will ensure your employees aren’t brushing the message off as spam.

The challenge of getting more employee reviews is made simple with Invite. Widewail gives you all of the tools you need to take control of your employer brand, attract top talent, and actively grow your business.