Managing Online Employer Reviews: An Impression Management Perspective for Talent Recruitment

The powerful effects of electronic word-of-mouth on employer branding and prehire outcomes have made it incumbent on employers to formulate effective responses to employer reviews on social media. By integrating research on organizational impression management and online customer service recovery, our research adds insight into different types of responses and their effects on potential job seekers. We employed text mining techniques to first identify distinct types of employer responses to positive and negative reviews observed on a major social media platform. Findings from our experiment based on vignettes created from topic modeling suggest that responding to reviews had significant positive effects on organizational attraction, and responding to negative reviews specifically resulted in additional significant positive effects on intentions to apply and employer reputation. Drawing on signaling theory, we further uncover that such responses improved perceptions of organizational competence, warmth, and sincerity when potential applicants read reviews with an employer response (versus no response). Warmth, in particular, mediated the effect of responses on both attraction and application intentions. We also found apologies to be the most effective response to negative reviews and exemplification to be the most effective response to positive reviews. Taken as a whole, our study suggests that organizations should invest in responding strategically to online reviews by employees, past and present.