Water cooler chatter has moved online, and what your peers say about their companies may impact your willingness to be recruited into an organization, depending on whether that chat is good or bad.

And it's some people giving pause, say a pair of analysts and authors of a recent book on how CIOs and chief marketing officers can team with employees and IT to make an organization worth working for.

Take HP as an example. When the company fired the shot heard 'round the world (i.e., the unanimous board decision to show CEO Mark Hurd the door after a he said/she said scandal), the Twitter accounts of the company's official social media representatives went all-quiet for the better part of a day.

No doubt the internal e-mails were flying fast and furious, but some employees made their displeasure public by heading to Glassdoor.com, a Web 2.0 water cooler where employees can anonymously rate companies and their leaders. 

Hurd's approval rating? A dismal 34 percent, the lowest rating for the CEO of any major tech company. By comparison, interim CEO Cathie Lesjack has a 100 percent approval rating.

In their book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers and Transform Your Business," Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Tedd Schadler write that IT can be a vital component to how a company views itself from within. IT, they point out, supports the operation with technology, its ability to scale solutions and provide tools to manage risk.

Which brings us back to Glassdoor and how reviews can impact an organization. The lower a company's approval rating, the harder it will be to recruit motivated IT pros. So if you're on the hunt for a new position, check out the anonymous chat generated via social media. It might be telling.