Glassdoor and Indeed are the best-known sites where a company's reputation as an employer is publicly rated. Candidates read several reviews before forming an opinion and diagnosing recurring trends. The uncomfortable part is that you do not control what those reviews say. What you can manage is the reputation around them, and almost all of that management happens well before any single review is written. Most importantly, it only works when it is done honestly.
You cannot delete an honest review
Start by giving up on removal, and understand why it rarely works. Reviews are scanned against the platform's guidelines before they ever post, so the ones that reach your profile have already cleared that filter. Removal after the fact is possible but uncommon: you can flag a review that genuinely breaks the rules, but "this made us look bad" is not a rule, and the platform explicitly prohibits threatening a reviewer with legal action. Companies that pour energy into deleting reviews, or worse, into unmasking and threatening whoever wrote them, turn a single bad review into a much bigger story about a company that punishes feedback. The work is not removing the record. It is managing everything around a record you cannot erase.
Respond, for the next candidate
Responding to reviews is the highest-leverage, lowest-cost move available, and most companies skip it. A majority of job seekers say their opinion of a company improves after they see it respond. Keep the reply professional, acknowledge what the reviewer raised instead of arguing with it, never name the person you think wrote it, and remember who the response is really for. It is not for the departed employee. It is for the next candidate reading over their shoulder. A calm, specific answer to a hard review does more for a reputation than ten glowing ones, because it shows a company that can take a hit and responds like an adult.
Generate reviews the honest way, or not at all
A thin or stale profile is its own problem, so encouraging reviews is fair, within the limits that matter. Glassdoor's own guidance is blunt about it: ask for honest reviews, not good ones. Do not offer incentives, and do not pressure or chase people, because reviews it finds were compensated or coerced get removed. Timing is where companies go wrong. The right moments are natural milestones: after onboarding, at a work anniversary, or at a point when someone actually has something to say. Ask broadly, and mean it: cherry-picking only your happiest people, or quietly tapping the top performers, is its own risk, because word travels at the water cooler and in the private Slack channels, and getting caught curating your reviews does more damage than a handful of lukewarm ones ever would. Keep it voluntary and anonymous, and let the record build steadily. Readers are better at spotting a manufactured burst than companies think. A profile that sat quiet for two years and suddenly sprouts twenty five-star reviews in a week does not read as momentum. It reads as a campaign.
The move that backfires: reacting after the fact
That last point has a specific and very common version. A company takes a public hit, a layoff, an executive scandal, a run of angry reviews, and only then emails the remaining staff asking everyone to go leave a review. It is the worst possible moment to ask. The timing gives it away: a wave of five-star reviews arriving right after a bad event announces itself as damage control. It runs straight into the rules against solicited and pressured reviews, so a chunk of them get filtered out anyway. And it lands on employees exactly when their goodwill is lowest, which is how a reputation tactic turns into a morale problem. Authentic review generation is a steady habit, not a crisis reflex. The companies that are covered when a bad week hits are the ones whose real, unforced reviews were already on the board.
Fake reviews cut both ways
Two temptations sit at the extremes, and both are traps. Posting fabricated positive reviews, or paying an agency to do so, breaks every platform's rules and now runs into the FTC's ban on fake and incentivized reviews. The fakes get removed, and the discovery becomes its own scandal. Flagging every negative review as fake is the mirror image and fails just as reliably, because an unfavorable review is not the same as a false one. Flag the ones that genuinely break the guidelines, a competitor's obvious plant, a personal attack, something from a person who never worked there, and leave the honest bad ones alone. You answer a real review by fixing what it points at, not by trying to erase it.
The only durable fix is upstream
None of this is people-management advice, and it is not trying to be. It is the reputation lesson underneath the tactics: a review profile is a readout of the workplace, and the only reliable way to change the readout is to change what it measures. Companies with strong review reputations tend to run a continuous feedback loop. They hear from their people regularly and act on it, so that by the time anything reaches Glassdoor, it already reflects a place worth working. The strategy and the reality have to match. When they do, review management is mostly maintenance. When they do not, no amount of responding, soliciting, or flagging closes the gap for long.
Glassdoor and Indeed did not create employer reputation. They made it legible. The company that manages its review reputation well treats the record as permanent, responds as if it has nothing to hide, earns its positive reviews honestly and consistently, and never resorts to reactive solicitation that gives the whole game away. Everything else is upstream, in the workplace the reviews are describing.
Part of the Employer Brand and Reputation pillar. Related: the DON'Ts of Reputation Management, Crisis Communication, and Glassdoor's Community Guidelines.