There's nothing quite like the feeling of having great people on your team to take care of your clients, each other and your business. And nothing is really worse than being understaffed and scrambling to find the right people. Chances are, if you're having trouble recruiting, you could be making this one key mistake when it comes to your digital marketing, that a lot of employees and potential employees are looking at when they're thinking of applying to companies these days. So check out today's episode where I'm going to share my number one tip for getting online reviews on job websites and how to actually get your team to do it. My name's Jack Jostes, and welcome to the Landscaper's Guide To Modern Sales and Marketing. This show is all about helping you attract the right customers to your company. And in this episode, the right employees through the latest digital marketing tactics. Let's dig in today's episode.
For those of you watching right now, I'm at the Lon Hagler archery range. It's a beautiful place up in Loveland, Colorado. One of my favorite places nearby. The drive here is amazing and you can hear all these birds. It's almost sunset here. Anyways, having a really relaxing time and really enjoying my team right now. I've got a really great team of people and it wasn't always that way. In fact, at one point we really didn't have enough people and we didn't have enough of the right people. And I looked on our Glassdoor profile and I realized we had a negative review average. Why? Because we only had one review. Now, if you're not familiar with Glassdoor, it's a website where employees or previous vendors can write anonymous reviews of businesses from an employment standpoint and another site that you're going to want to use is indeed.com.
So these sites are typically going to show up when people Google you, if they see an ad of yours for a job, or they get a referral that you're hiring, they're probably going to Google you. And in fact, the searches have doubled year over year for people Googling landscaping jobs near me, that those were people literally Googling on their smartphone potentially even while they're working for their previous company. Right? So I've shared previous interviews on the podcast with some of my clients who have used some of these digital marketing tactics, like having a careers page on your website, but not all of them have the online reviews in the right places. So the first thing that you have got to do is claim your profile on Glassdoor.com and indeed.com. Go ahead and create a free profile. Make sure that you can log in. You, the business owner. Not your marketing person or office assistant, like you, the business owner should go and do this.
It's really easy. Upload your logo and then you've got to get your team to write reviews. And the way that I did this was first, I asked people, and I asked them, and I asked them… and they wouldn't do it. And I realized I was missing a key part of selling anything, which is explaining the benefit to the people that you're trying to get to do it.
Explain The Benefit To YOUR EMPLOYEES Of The Company Having Employee Reviews Online
And the benefit that you've got to explain to your employees is, chances are, the people who are really on the team who really want to work with you, they know that the company's hurting. And for me, when we were understaffed, there were people who were just overworked and they were stressed out. Our sales person was like, can I even sell stuff? We don't have the staff, right? So there was kind of a low morale. And when I helped them realize, Hey, by hiring this next position, you're going to have less work to do...
You're going to have a way more manageable workload. And the quality is going to go up and we'll be able to sell more to the sales person. Once I started sharing the why, why these were important and how it was impacting us, I quickly got over five reviews and it pushed our review average positive, and we've continued to systematically ask for them ongoing. So if you don't have good reviews on Glassdoor or Indeed right now, again, go claim your profiles and second, ask your team and send it out to them and make it fun.
Give Your People Pizza and Beer… Then Ask For The Review!
I have another client who had a pizza party, where they gave out pizza and beer, and were like, "Hey, we're doing reviews. Now, everyone take out your phones." And I also let people know that if they didn't feel comfortable writing a review, and there was something that could be better about working here, that I'd welcome that conversation personally.
And I found out in some cases things that we needed to do and to improve. So hopefully this was helpful. You know, having the right people on your team is so important to serving your customers, to just enjoying running your business, right? It's not fun when you don't have the right people on your team. I do have some more recruiting tips. And if you check out landscapersguide.com/podcast, you can see some of those things. There's a tab for 'Recruiting' where I've categorized some of those posts. So check it out, make sure you subscribe at landscapersguide.com/podcast. If you're checking this out on YouTube, like this video, be sure to subscribe and give us some reviews on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thanks so much for checking out today's show and I'll talk to you soon.