As founder of PranifyRx, I speak with multiple media agencies each week to understand their challenges and develop solutions to help them win more business, improve employee productivity and drive greater profitability.

Over the past 6 months, a common theme has emerged: recruiting, hiring and retaining employees is media agencies’ #1 challenge.

Why? The pandemic and remote working has reduced the impact of the physical workplace and company culture, while employees have raised their standards of what they expect from their work experience.

The result: The Great Resignation and declining media agency Glassdoor ratings.

Here’s an example of a NYC-based media agency’s Glassdoor ratings over the past 24 months.

As competition to hire and retain media agency employees escalates, media agencies are focusing more on optimizing their Glassdoor Ratings. Plenty has been written on the basics of claiming your profile, encouraging current employees to leave reviews etc. But there’s a missing optimization almost no one is talking about, and it has to do with Glassdoor’s default sorting order: by Popularity of review.

From Glassdoor: “At a high level, our default sorting order is by "Popular" which consists of a combination of the helpful count, the recency of the review, and several other factors. Generally, reviews that are marked "helpful" get more visibility due to the algorithm of our ranking system.”

Let’s take a look at a media agency (SSCG) that’s performing quite well on Glassdoor, with improving ratings over the past 24 months:

80% of their first-page reviews were marked “Helpful” by at least one employee, of which 100% were 5-star reviews.

The only first-page review that was not marked helpful was a 3-star review.

What does this mean? It likely indicates someone at SSCG is aware of Glassdoor’s review sorting algorithm, and has decided to mark their 5-star reviews as helpful in order to get them to rank higher on the first page of reviews.

This is an easy optimization that a single person inside your media agency can implement with less than 5 minutes work.

If you want to showcase your highest-quality reviews on Glassdoor, try marking your 5-star reviews as Helpful today.