Joe Wiggins

Greater transparency in the workplace means that the balance of power is shifting more towards employees. Job seekers used to be in the dark, in the sense that the employer would hold all the cards from the moment someone walked through the door for an interview. Information about salary, the interview process, the benefits package, the culture and how an organisation had treated its staff in the past was restricted, or at the very least difficult to find. This has meant that making decisions about where to work has been, until recently, based on very limited, incomplete and certainly one-sided information.

An organisation’s employer brand is not just about what the employer puts out but it is also about the voice of the workers. In today’s online, social media world, job seekers get aggregated opinions of millions of ‘insiders’ on tap, plus data that they simply could not get elsewhere.

We know that people love to share both positive and negative opinions about work, and the voracious development of mobile technology is only accelerating this trend. In fact, the chances are, candidates are reading organisation and previous interviewees' reviews on their phones minutes before the start of an interview.

This transparency will continue to rapidly change the workplace. Those organisations that cannot, or refuse to, adapt will stumble and those that embrace the trend will flourish. We are already seeing this today, with organisations living their lives in the open finding it easier and cheaper to recruit and having much higher rates of retention. Sites, such as Glassdoor, which enable this workplace transparency, are having a significant impact on both the talent acquisition process and employee engagement.

Joe Wiggins is associate director at Glassdoor

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