A dissatisfied customer costs you a sale. A credible former employee costs you the next ten hires, and you will never be told that is what happened — the offers simply stop being accepted.
Customer sentiment is measured everywhere. Workforce sentiment is measured almost nowhere, and it compounds.
A product complaint is one person's experience of a transaction. An account from someone who worked for you is read as testimony — about how you treat people, how decisions get made, and what it is actually like behind the statements. Candidates weigh it far more heavily than anything you publish, and so do journalists, acquirers and prospective board members.
Senior candidates research thoroughly before accepting. The ones you want most are the ones most likely to look, and most able to walk away quietly without telling you why.
Much of it happens on platforms that do not appear in search and that nobody inside the company is watching. The first sign is usually a slowdown in your pipeline that gets blamed on the market.
Reviews and posts from years ago are still the first thing a candidate reads. Unlike a news cycle, this record does not move on by itself.
Confidential information, client names, internal documents and trade secrets travel out with people. Detecting that early is a different exercise from reading reviews, and it is one we run.
Most reputation services monitor the left-hand column. The decisions are being made from the right.
Glassdoor, Indeed, Comparably, Kununu. New reviews, rating movement, and the patterns that suggest a coordinated departure rather than ordinary churn.
LinkedIn posts and comments, including the quieter signal of people removing you from their profile or marking a tenure as ended earlier than you recorded it.
Blind verifies employment by company email, which makes what is said there credible and is exactly why it carries weight with candidates.
Industry Facebook groups, Telegram channels, Discord servers and Slack communities. Invisible to search, read closely by the people in your sector.
Reddit threads in industry and employment communities, and the growing volume of resignation and workplace content on short-form video.
Client names, internal material, pricing, roadmaps and documents appearing where they should not. Flagged immediately and preserved as evidence.
The weeks either side of a senior departure are when most of this originates — a resignation post, a review written in the first fortnight afterwards, a conversation in a group chat, material taken on the way out. It is also the period when nobody is watching, because everyone is busy managing the transition itself.
Commissioned ahead of a known exit, or opened immediately when one is unexpected.
Every serious candidate searches you. The senior ones search thoroughly, ask people in their network, and read the anonymous platforms. By the time you are in a conversation, they have already formed a view — and if it is a poor one, you usually get a polite decline rather than the reason.
We run the research a candidate would run, across the platforms they actually use, and give you back exactly what they would see.
Commissioned ahead of an executive search, so the picture is known and addressed before the first approach rather than discovered through declines.
Headhunters are asked about your reputation constantly. Giving them an accurate current picture is worth more than hoping the question does not come up.
Where what candidates find is accurate, that is a business problem rather than a reputation one and we will tell you so. Where it is out of date, unrepresentative or the work of a small number of accounts, that is correctable — and knowing which you are dealing with is the first useful thing.