What is Glassdoor? I have to admit, until recently I thought it could be a place in Middle Earth. Not exactly, but it’s true that the 350 employees at Glassdoor often take on big challenges – with LinkedIn being the largest – using a wealth of information about jobs and companies.

Glassdoor is a bit like TripAdvisor for HR, gathering user-generated, anonymous reviews about companies and company life. And having recently raised $70 million in funding from Google Capital and Tiger Global Management (known to be investors particularly interested in very promising tech firms), Glassdoor is now valued at around $1 billion and is set to become a bit of a behemoth itself. Despite LinkedIn being a clear winner in the unique visitor stakes (approximately 121 million per month globally versus Glassdoor’s 16 million), Glassdoor still claims that a typical profile receives three times more traffic than the same profile on LinkedIn.

Just as TripAdvisor did for holidays, Glassdoor is changing the way we look at recruitment marketing and company culture. And with Google’s backing it’s gathering significant pace since its 2007 inauguration. So how does a recruiter make the most of Glassdoor content?

Well, first it’s worth considering where that content comes from.

Current or former employees will submit and discuss the minutiae of the interview process, the pros and cons of normal office life, how bosses behave towards staff, salaries and the prospect of a raise plus other professional benefits one can expect when they join a company. There is even an option where one can leave advice to managers to help them run the company better (though this bit harbours some hilarious anecdotes against the organisations that have left much to be desired).

Users are savvy jobseekers that learn about a company and how it stacks up in its marketplace.

Just trust

Trust is implicit. The content curators at Glassdoor are required to check that the submission is from a genuine employee, and employers are not allowed to delete or remove comments. It’s a community firmly focused on providing genuine word-of-mouth recommendations, which really means that as an employer there’s only one way you can win – be transparent.

Yep, the only way for a company to conquer Glassdoor – to emerge laden with stories of great fortune and the camaraderie of its intrepid adventurers – is to actually provide those things. And then tell someone about it.

Get a good looking profile

We always say that great recruitment marketing stems from a fantastic Employee Value Proposition (EVP), and that’s not something that can be faked. If you pay for Glassdoor’s Enhanced Employer Profile you get total control of your look, brand story and how you promote yourself to potential recruits, so how you present your EVP is more or less up to you.

It’s unlike the more rigid format of LinkedIn – which is more geared towards employees, while company profiles take a backseat – and the Enhanced Employer area can be much more of your own personal space. Which means all those content marketing techniques you so brilliantly adapted to promote your website can apply here. These jobseekers have a passion, which you must show to match with your own.

The EVP is in many ways king here, just as content is king across the wider digital world, as your ability to stand out amongst the rest relies on providing clear and beautifully presented reasons why you’re the one to work for – the prospects you present and the culture you adopt. It taps directly into the needs of jobseekers.

It’s almost a perfect microcosm of recruitment content marketing, as users are presented with their job prospects in a way that forces them to compare them to the next guy; to make up their own minds whether to give you a call. It relies on user engagement, which is only prompted by the quality of your profile. Users are savvy jobseekers that learn about a company and how it stacks up in its marketplace before taking the plunge. They’re keen to know the inner workings of your firm – do your employees enjoy the everyday? Are they happy? These are jobseekers that can appreciate the allure of margarita Fridays, but are much more interested in how begrudgingly that person is drinking the margarita.

These jobseekers have a passion, which you must show to match with your own.

Strong ranking

Keeping in mind the parallels one can draw with wider content marketing strategy, we also have to consider that Glassdoor ranks highly because it’s a pillar of SEO – it stands to reason that the savvy job hunters primarily go to a site that delivers what they want. So, if someone’s looking for a job, chances are your Glassdoor job ad is going to be on page one of the search engine results. Needless to say, it better be a good ad.

Meanwhile you can link your blog and Facebook pages, and a potentially very wide audience have a direct link to your story. A story they feel they can trust.

Trust is key on Glassdoor. Companies trust that the people using Glassdoor have a certain degree of intuitive sense simply by being there; people on the site trust each other and therefore trust companies that score well in reviews because it’s genuine. The best firms remain transparent. So what you really shouldn’t do is try and dilute the bad comments with a few good ones you made up yourself. Trust me, unless you’re a very clever writer, you’ll be rumbled and your reputation will suffer immeasurably. Nip it in the bud and realise that there’s only one way to bring things up to standard: to paraphrase a shoe – just do it.

This might all sound a bit daunting – another thing for content managers to keep their eye on. But if we look at things a little more simply, Glassdoor just makes it harder to hide a disappointing company behind the high quality online content it paid to have created. It forces companies to practise what they preach and realize their own heady claims. You can trust the quality of candidates because they trust in the quality of you.

So, do you want to stay shacked up in the proverbial Shire, or shape up and climb the peaks of Glassdoor to find your precious?