How Company Reviews has bolstered Bupa's employer brand

Find out how Bupa are using Company Reviews to build their employer brand to gain an edge in the employment market.

Nhi Nguyen and Ryan Biggs are strong believers in the power of employer branding.

As talent managers for healthcare company Bupa, both are committed to engaging candidates with the company’s values and culture – whether through recruitment websites, social media or company open days.

They are also no strangers to SEEK’s Company Reviews: a space for employers to position their brand in the job market.

With 18,000 employers across Australia and New Zealand, Bupa’s Company Reviews page launched in 2015, with Nguyen and Biggs driving activity on the organisation’s page since February this year. According to Biggs, Resourcing Partner, Volume at Bupa Australia and New Zealand, the pair use Company Reviews because SEEK is “a very popular job forum in Australia, which means the likelihood of a review coming through SEEK is just far greater compared to other sites.”

As for the second reason they use Company Reviews, Nguyen, Talent Brand Manager, Digital, Bupa Australia and New Zealand, puts it simply. “We’re very passionate about the brand perception that candidates have of Bupa,” she says. “With Company Reviews, we saw an opportunity for us to tangibly influence this.”

Employer branding can often be a neglected part of talent acquisition. Aware of this risk, Nguyen and Biggs use Company Reviews to communicate Bupa’s values to jobseekers.  “The more you focus on employment branding, the more candidates know of and are attracted to your brand,” says Nguyen. “You’re not spending so much money finding people because you’ve already invested time on employment brand of Bupa out there.”

Nguyen and Biggs also value the feedback function of Company Reviews. Bupa’s page currently has over 220 employer reviews and ratings in categories such as ‘diversity and equal opportunity’, and ‘work life balance’. Nguyen and Biggs personally respond to reviews, including complaints, which they see as an opportunity to enhance Bupa’s employer brand.

 “We just want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to take it further if they wanted to, and that’s by responding to everyone like they’re a human, not giving homogenous response,” says Biggs. “We give them access to an internal program we’ve got, which is a way they can anonymously voice those concerns. We also give them an email address that links to our direct contact.”

This honesty – a willingness to “own the negative and positive,” according to Nguyen – impresses candidates: something Biggs discovered when he met jobseekers during one of Bupa’s open days. “We’ve had a number actually say, ‘…. I was preparing for this interview and I went on SEEK and I saw these two people responding to all these reviews.’ I talked them through the process and they said, ‘we can’t actually believe you do that.’” says Biggs. “The candidates are looking and doing all their homework online; they’re assessing us before we’re assessing them.”

Nguyen and Biggs look forward to seeing further developments in Company Review’s capabilities. They regularly share their feedback with Fernando Tinoco, product manager at SEEK, who welcomes their input.

“There is not a week that goes by without comments and suggestions from both jobseekers and employers being passed straight into the team designing and developing our products,” says Tinoco. 

“For instance, we’ve been hearing about the need for hirers to proactively nurture and curate pools of interested candidates that have an affinity with their companies. In response to that, we have recently introduced an ability for candidates to follow employers that they aspire to work at. This signal is then passed straight into our Talent Search product, where hirers can discover and connect with these candidates”.

Nguyen and Biggs hope for more of the same. “We love working with SEEK and they’re doing some amazing things,” says Biggs. 

“We’re competing in highly competitive markets and we need candidates to have an accurate representation of who we are, and what we’re about.”