Is Glassdoor reliable, and if not, are there any reliable alternatives?
[0] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Employee-Review-ROLI-RVW17219691.htm
It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the company will hire a firm to write them positive reviews and disparage those who have left bad reviews, and not realise that prospective employees can completely tell the difference between the level of detail in the negative reviews 'eg, there was a pm who used to try to physically intimidate the female members of the team by leaning over them when he talked, I saw this on a weekly basis for 6 months until he was promoted to the programme manager and stopped working in our office', and the BS positive ones like 'it's a challenging place to work, the people posting negative reviews are used to workplaces where they need less initiative blah blah blah.
You'll see what I mean as you read them.
Sites like glassdoor are the only safety net we have to protect ourselves from those kinds of situations.
One company (Series D, 300+ employees) that I worked at did this, sort of. It was less a hired firm, and more the CEO posting.
> and the BS positive ones like 'it's a challenging place to work, the people posting negative reviews are used to workplaces where they need less initiative blah blah blah.
Absolutely. There are a few key phrases that are huge red flags for me. Consistent "themes" showing up on Glassdoor along the lines of "people who can't stand the heat need to get out of the kitchen" or "people are used to the old ways and need to grow up" or "this is a fast paced work environment and not everybody can handle it" are red flags that the company is trying to influence their Glassdoor rankings. It's like the opposite of sandbagging... if they make enough of the same comments, then Glassdoor will pick up a theme that provides an "excuse" for the company's legitimate bad reviews.
Yes. In my experience: Only people extremely pissed off take the time to open their macbook and write a truthful rage at 2am. There are good reviews, but they just don't have the same soul crushing honest factor. Comically, people think they are being anonymous -- but you can't soul crush without knowing -- and people (engineers) quickly put things together.
I'd often remember to look up a company on Glassdoor after an iffy interview. It sent me running away from a couple places I was on the fence about.
And it's just as llaith says. I'd usually have to wade through the sockpuppet froth at the top to find the detailed reviews from developers 3-6 months ago describing the dysfunctional culture or 60+ hour workweeks.
I ask, as the payment method is critical to understand it's reliability.
If it is ads, then yes, I think it should be reliable. 'You' are the 'product' in that case. More negative press will likely keep you clicking and searching about, therefore more money.
If it is the companies, then it it not likely reliable. Why would you pay a company to essentially bad-mouth you? You pay them for good press (the pizzeria in NY on Yelp being an egregious exception). I'd say this holds if the companies can pay in any way at all. If they can influence for dollar, even rarely, then the whole thing is suspect.
Anyone know the real answer?
However, I can't find anything official about either and Wikipedia isn't very helpful. They do have some information about their existing funding:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassdoor
A part of me thinks this type of thing would make a good not-for-profit enterprise. I'd even consider some sort of government backing. I'd say a service like that has good social potentials and can help society to make nformed choices.
So yes, Glassdoor's intensive structure is aligned to make employers happy. They don't take any income from individual review contributors or readers.
Maybe Glassdoor reviews need the opportunity for a company representative to say, "this is valid criticism and we are addressing it."
I used to believe that the "please rate my app"-popup was bad ux. Now I know why it's used.
I'd think the same pattern applies to GD. Why would I write a review when satisfied with my work? I'd have no reason to even visit GD.
Nothing gets my goat more than this kind of thing. Suddenly, if I don't want to be harassed every day, I "can't hack it"?
Usually it's simple like "they moved on" or "they were promoted". One time I got an angry, "Well they just couldn't handle it here!" Huge red flag
However, glassdoor is not completely objective-- companies can get negative reviews removed simply by complaining about them, and the quality control on this is not good. So that means that over time the HR department can just keep making accounts and complaining about the negative reviews and they disappear.
Thus if you leave a negative review you have to be a watchdog... and if it gets removed, even without cause, glassdoor won't let you leave another one.
However they can't hold back the tide, here's a comment from a recent review (redacted for privacy): " Forced "culture". It's explicitly stated that culture fit is a huge part of this backwards company. If you are too tired to go to a happy hour when the XXXX crew comes to town prepare for awkward questions why and being told you're not supporting the culture if you don't attend - by the CTO."
Reading the reviews of this company (that I worked at and know first hand) I see a lot of negative recent reviews, but the overall score is 2.4... way too high to be accurate.
HR is still grooming the reviews and leaving fake positives, to keep that overall rating up, and the negatives are all relatively recent (though they describe problems that have existed for 5 years.)
Glassdoor has the same pros and cons of any review aggregator. It is susceptible to gaming (perhaps uniquely so, like Yelp, because the companies being reviewed are also Glassdoor's advertisers). But it provides a directionally accurate view of a corporate environment given a large enough sample size of reviews--and as with any review, more credence should be given to examples that are clear, detailed and well-written.
The negative reviews are pretty much the only interesting data points on the site. Take them with a grain of salt, sure. But you have to take the positives (especially large cohorts of positives over short time intervals) with the whole freaking salt shaker. The aggregate scores offer some directional guidance, but bear in mind that you are not looking at the total sample size of reviews; you are looking at the sample size after the company has culled and gamed what it can, which is often quite a lot of the original pool.
This is sort of like the directional reliability of eBay scores, now that there is a short decay on past reviews, and pretty much anyone with 10 minutes on their hands can get negative reviews expunged.
I agree with this. I'm usually more suspect of the glowing, very positive reviews, particularly a bunch in a row within a certain time period. I've read at least once that I can remember where employers were essentially providing incentives for employees to go out and write positive things on Glassdoor, in an effort to clean up its image on that site.
I'd say look for themes. I'm interviewing with a company right now where the reviews are overwhelmingly positive, but I've turned the mental alarms off for now because it's totally backed up by all of my interaction with anyone associated with the place. Genuinely great culture in play. I only say this to balance out any message I might be giving to not trust any positive reviews.
You really are best off reading through and looking for themes, rather than relying on the aggregate ratings, or categorical statements of "good" and "bad" in any particular review. Culture is totally subjective, so look for a description of what that culture is, versus whether the reviewer thinks its good or bad.
I figure that adding a negative review is only going to add to the noise. So, I usually avoid doing so unless it is particularly egregious.
This means that I also weigh the good reviews heavier than I do the negative reviews. I do try to keep an eye out for fluff reviews and try to ignore those. No, this product didn't 'literally save your life' and things like that. Many of the negative reviews read like they didn't understand the product or service and are displeased that it didn't meet their goals, which would be expected because it didn't claim to meet those goals.
It does make me wonder if there's a way to ensure honest and objective reviews. I doubt there is, but we may be able to make the system better.
I run a site called TransparentCareer (https://www.transparentcareer.com) and we've tried to make all of this data quantitative and verify that the person actually worked at the organization and what role they were in. We are getting ready to release a qualitative type review/question answering system using the same verification method and you will be able to see what department within the company the review is in reference to.
I would love to hear how people think this could be done better as we are currently developing the product and would love if it could solve this need in the best way possible. Is employee verification the biggest problem or is it something else?
Or even worse, from https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Lab49-Reviews-E257101.ht...
> * Requiring new joiners to write a Glass Door review as part of their on-boarding process, presumably in an attempt to improve their rating.
The recipe was to hire in a bunch of college grads, and while they're still nervous about their first corporate gig, have the VP of Human Resources email a demand that they post a glowing review.
And, when the rating inevitably continues to be hammered by negatives, instead of addressing the patterns within the negative reviews, HR would send that review demand to the overseas team(s) where the jobs were even more tenuously-held.
While HR made glaringly obvious positive reviews, themselves, of course. Pretty insidious.
The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by employees who were fired for basically being awful, hostile, aggressive people who fought with everyone and refused to do work. These are the folks who are technically competent and think that gives them a pass for generally being an awful human being to work with. Being willing to fire people like this has resulted in this company having the happiest and most productive culture I've ever personally worked in, but it does lead to some pretty harsh reviews on Glassdoor. You're not going to get any of this context from the reviews.
The most informative reviews are the negative ones written by folks who left voluntarily and were not fired. In fact, these reviews, if they exist, can be a gold mine of valuable information. But it can sometimes be hard to pick these out, as folks who were fired sometimes lie about it and make it seem as if they chose to leave.
A generic tip when reading negative reviews is to look for specific details and concrete examples. The more details -- and the more specific they are -- the more likely the review is to have some basis in fact. This tip alone can filter out a lot of noise in both positive and negative reviews.
If you ever want to write a negative review, the corollary is that you should include specific, concrete examples to convince the reader that you're not just disgruntled. Avoid emotional language.
A negative review written with a calm, collected tone is also a sign that there might be something there.
It's also worth looking for themes that seem to be consistent across multiple negative reviews. As with Amazon reviews, it's often best to look at distributional properties of Glassdoor reviews rather than focus on specific reviews too much.
If this happens consistently over a longer period of time, I'd say there's a problem with conflict management in that company. Technically competent people usually start pushing back if they see a better/simpler way of solving the problem they are given, but instead of taking their feedback or giving constructive criticism, the management just tries to shut them up.
I tried to make mine so over the top that it would obviously be spotted as fake but still within the "compliment" range that I thought my boss would accept it as genuine. Then when I left I wrote a proper review and indicated that most of the other reviews were probably untrustworthy since everyone was asked to write a review.
For instance: looking at a recent review of my company from a few days ago, it saddens me to read something written so well that is so inaccurate. The content opines that people of color would not be welcome at our organization. I cannot tell you how completely FAR off that is from the truth. Diversity is something we value tremendously. That being said, we are a tech company in the agricultural space that is located in the midwest. The fact of the matter is: our pool of candidates is simply not that diverse to begin with.
Because we are a small startup focusing on survival, we hire the right person for the job, regardless of their background! Ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc... is never part of the decision! When this sentiment was shared with the organization, the reviewer interpreted it as "we do not care about diversity and people of color". Not making a specific point to hire diverse folks is NOT the same as not appreciating a diverse team!
Now this is almost a self fulfilling prophecy: a person of color might read that post and be completely turned off from even giving our company a shot. It hurts to imagine this scenario.
Long story short: the unhappy folks are usually the loudest and so I think you'll tend to get the 'jade colored' glasses.
Another anecdote: my fiancee was warned by a friend who previously worked at a company she was interviewing at. This person warned her that her manager was mean and grumpy and she'd be unhappy there. My fiancee has been there for months now without any problems whatsoever, and this manager tends to confide in her more than others on the team.
So I think you need to use every available resource you can to gather data points that can feed into your decision... but a lot of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Get ready for people telling you how you're wrong.
But I am going to tell you that you're doing the whole racial diversity thing 'wrong'. Either don't give a crap about this stuff and let your company be a meritocracy, or if you're going to appease that kind of crowd, then do it their way.
Which essentially is,
- Make everyone inclusive, at the same time make that effort seem easy and not forced. Like "tonight we're celebrating Diwali night" rather than "In the honor of victory of light over Darkness from the land of Indian people and to honor Sajeet, we are celebrating Diwali night". - Never say that you're trying so hard to make things inclusive, that violates the earlier point in a literal sense. The whole point is to make things inclusive but not making it obvious to anyone. - Don't claim you hire people regardless of their background (this is a signaling problem, it's like saying "All Lives Matter" it has nothing to do whether you're logically arguing over the point, but rather to let other people know what your opinions are), don't claim that you're a meritocracy, but don't ever claim that you hire minorities first (because this breaks the earlier rule of making your effort look hard).
At the end of the day, understand that you are either hiring the best person for the job or you're "promoting racial diversity" in your company, don't say both the things.
Hopefully this is just by accident, but this comment has the air of downplaying the value of racial diversity. Imagine someone saying "we value diversity of all kinds, not just how much estrogen you have", or "we value diversity of all kinds, not just which invisible being you pray to".
I guess I should go leave a positive review, but the motivation of an angry/hurt person is WAY higher than those of us who are happy.
(shrug)
1. It tends to attract complaints and unhappy (ex) employees more than anything else. The ratings tend to skew low as a result. Look for common themes, and take them with a grain of salt.
2. Complaints can be specific to a department or role. Complaints about Amazon, e.g., may be related to working in one of their distribution centers, not in HQ/IT.
3. Current employees don't tend to leave reviews. Unlike an annual employee survey—which would be a better indicator if companies chose to publish them—Glassdoor tends to ignore current employees.
I think overall it's good for a quick check on morale if there are >20 reviews. The salary data is worthless, high earners within companies do not advertise what they earn.
"Wow I don't understand these five star reviews, I'm totally a real person who works here! Positives: <everything is amazing>; Negatives: <something inconsequential>"
Anyways, that's when you politely decline to interview.
This kind of thing is generally a yes/no type of thing.
"There's a parking lot"
Wow, this company is reaching for the stars there!
(Note: I don't know where the company is located, but generally having a parking lot isn't a bragging point.)
What does this say about us? "It's ok to abuse people, just do it equally."
If you want to know what a company is like... go look for yourself?
The first is when I was asked to do interviews for my replacement after I handed my notice in at one company. Everyone knew that I was leaving because I hated it, I didn't even have another job lined up. But I was the person on my team _least_ likely to give a bad impression of the company.
The second is when I was interviewing for a startup tech lead role. One of the engineers gave me a tech test, then we had a chat, and I asked, "What's the worst thing about the company?" She told me: "Basically the CEO has no idea how software development works, or agile development, and we have loads of arguments and it's really frustrating. We're trying to hire a tech lead to shield us from that." Needless to say, I didn't take the job...
The Old School method was to ask around, find actual company insiders or former employees.
These days it's relatively easy to find these individuals via a quick sort on Linkedin. Simply, reach out and talk to these people direct.
If someone pinged you with a transparent motive-- We share a mutual connection in 'Mike D', I'm interested in learning more about your experience in (company/ex-employer) because they a have a job opening I want to explore. Would you be open to a brief 10 minute call/Skype?
Wouldn't you tell that person the straight deal?
If there is a low distribution of 1 star ratings, then either the 1 star people are outliers or there is some sort of incentive for the higher ratings (either pressure from management to give positive reviews, or the company could just pay for fake reviews). Sometimes this is obvious, like a bunch of positive reviews that sound the same posted in a short timeframe, and sometimes it isn't. At the end of the day it is going to be a gut feeling.
Before I was a contractor [ where reviews mean much less as you're not marrying your employer ], I'd take more of a Goldilocks approach to the reviews. The outliers (like a product review on Amazon) have to be smoothed out somewhat mentally.
Most of the responses here are spot on but I want to address that one specific point. It's highly unlikely those new reviews are HR plants. Instead, the company is clearly aware of the negative review and the fact that it's getting publicity and has asked/encouraged their current staff to post their own reviews.
For example, I interviewed at a company that had a fair amount of negative reviews on GlassDoor, as well as some positive ones that came across (in my opinion) as astro-turfing. I brought this up with the guy doing my interview, and it lead to an interesting discussion about the internal dynamics of the company and what the real pros and cons are. His answer was basically that Division X had some real issues but they were working on it, but this position was going to be in Division Y which functioned in a different way. I ultimately decided against this offer for different reasons, but I appreciated the candor of the interviewer when I brought it up.
The usefulness of GlassDoor probably decreases as the company gets larger. I doubt the reviews of, say, Google or IBM have any bearing on reality because they're so massive and the experience inside the company is certainly not universal. Likewise, it's probably not that accurate for tiny companies.
I'll close with a (guarded) anecdote. I happened to know from insiders that a particular startup (~100 employees) was very dysfunctional and the leadership had severe issues. The GlassDoor reviews had detailed scathing review after detailed scathing review for a little while, then switched to entirely things along the lines of "[ThisCompany] is great! It's sooo great! And I love the leadership, especially [CTO who is a known jerk and known to be driving the company into the ground]. He/She is tough but fair and sooo smart!" So, take that anecdote for what it's worth.
The larger the company gets, the less useful glassdoor is. The same company could have very awful very political teams, and very awesome and great teams.
More useful.. go out to the bar with your future team. If you didn't enjoy it, then pass. If you enjoyed it, then think about working there.
For example: I came across a company with many glowing 5-star reviews, and one of those reviews was from a software developer who very matter-of-factly stated that it was not a place for people who take issue with working overtime on a regular basis, as if doing so was somehow a point of pride within that company's culture.
Yeah, no thanks.
So yeah, in many cases glassdoor is a strong signal. Don't just look at the average rating, read the reviews from the past few months and look for trends and red flags.
I also interviewed with a well-known company two weeks ago and they told me, during the interview, that they've had to have Glassdoor remove comments about their idiotic interview quizzes. I still look at Glassdoor, but I don't take it as seriously as I do reviews on Amazon or Yelp.
A lot of negative reviews for my current employer are incredibly spot-on.
I had a very negative experience with my former employer, which currently has 11 reviews with a 4.9 star average, which led them to be rated the #10 best employer in a very large tech market.
They were constantly explicitly threatened to fire people. Ran off 2 out of their 3 founders, some of them very abruptly, jeopardizing the staff's pay and benefits (and this was just a couple of months before winning that "best in town" award). They either cynically produced horrible quality code for their clients, or farmed you out as a body shop to local software teams that couldn't attract their own talent directly, and for good reason.
Exactly 1 year later I now recognize exactly 1/3 of the bio/profiles listed on their website, the other 2/3 being totally unrecognized and new.
When I left the place I had a negative sick time balance, which they offered to write off, and also kept my health care running for an extra month after the month that I departed. And during the same conversation they offered that "we should not talk bad about each other," and of course they had the one really nice guy have this conversation with me.
So now, I look for individual negative reviews which seem reasonably articulate and unemotional, and if a place looks interesting enough, try to queue these issues up for questions during a prospective interview.
Read longer reviews and judge for yourself. Don’t trust the star ratings.
But it's important to remember that these are static data points in time, so there are certainly factors you should weigh based on other available data. For public companies, it can be important to assess changes in organization structure including and around the CEO. For private companies, sale of company is worth considering, though that top leader may still be in place post-sale.
Depending on the role you intend to enter, a negative tone may be what you're looking for -- lots of managers enter roles to help turn around a company. That the problems have been called out directly provides an important starting point in understanding whether you will actually be in a position to fix the problem. And public disclosure of the problems also provides a clear target for response through subsequent Marketing/PR and corporate improvements.
Some observations:
- Reviews are more or less accurate, but in the context that it's a big company and most of the reviews apply to their immediate team
- Most reviews don't seem to be aware that they are actually reviewing their team/their manager/their org
- Viewed with that lense/context, reviews are accurate but not representative of the company as a whole
All in all, if you look at the reviews holistically, they paint a good enough picture. Most reviews for the company in this case were positive, a few bad teams, but for the most part the company at least makes an effort to provide a good environment for employees. After reading enough reviews, that theme did come across and I would agree with it
I imagine the site is great for assessing the area you're going into, but only really paints a good picture of the entire organization when the company is pretty small.
I would trust the ensemble and the overall tone of reviews
That said, I am a big fan of ROLIs products, and the JUCE framework is a great audio/plugin framework used by tons of companies in that arena. Seeing the 2/3 reviews makes me sorta sad, but I can see how they would have to be a lean, long hour hard work wearing many hats kinda place. Building semi pricey gear for musicians is a hard sell, as musicians are usually a lower income segment of the population...
The more aggressive the company is in managing public perception through online review platforms, the more challenging it will be for anything negative to get out there.
Companies have a strong incentive to systematically manipulate online review systems. The people leaving the reviews 'organically' just have some intrinsic motivation to write them. Over time the shills will win no matter what kind of rules you set up to prevent it. To some extent also the capacity to run a good shill program is a signal of the health of the business doing the shilling, so it doesn't completely destroy the value of them.
The main way to counteract this kind of shilling is for objective and trusted third parties to compare companies, products, etc. with tests that cannot be faked and perhaps combined with some subjective evaluation. If the user is not paying to maintain the accuracy and objectivity of the reviews that they're using to inform their decision, then why should they expect it to be anything other than some combination of shill-spam, the odd lunatic, and the increasingly rare fair-minded and well-informed reviewer? The aggregate of all those things is not necessarily the ideal wisdom-of-crowds outcome because all of the inputs can be defrauded or otherwise manipulated in various directions.
Example of the first: when evaluating one employer there were many negative reviews, but mostly from a particular high-churn part of the company; the experience of easy-come easy-go customer-facing support may not tell you much about the experience of someone even one level removed from that position. The odd positive review was usually a higher-level tech, and even if they had a negative outlook on the company or its future, such reviews would still add "but don't listen to these guys--they just couldn't hack it."
Example of the second, same company: it's very easy to get hired by this company but training is limited and you could just as easily get fired for poor performance -- i.e., the company's hiring requirements were significantly less than their actual on-the-job skill requirements.
So I applied to this company based on mostly negative reviews. I was aiming for a higher position, and I was confident in my ability while having very little evidence of it: if their hiring requirements had actually matched the job I got, I would never have gotten it.
From what I've seen, a lot of good or decent places tend to have a general positive rating, and the really bad ones are going to have multiple negative reviews.
Take individual reviews with a grain of salt, but as a group I think it's fairly accurate.
I worked for a ecommerce company and the CEO gave anyone who wrote a positive glassdoor review a $50 credit on the site.
Also, it will bias towards bad reviews. I've never posted a review of a place I loved working at (and therefore never posted a review). I guess I should, but it would probably just be assumed to be astroturfing.
One other issue is when there are multiple classes of workers. For example Netflix has a lot of negative reviews from the folks who work in the DVD warehouses. But their work environment has nothing to do with the software engineering part of the company, which is the majority of the company, so it skews negative. Amazon has a similar problem, where a lot of the reviews come from the warehouse workers, who, for better or worse, get treated differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_bias
If I remember, things like these tend to draw out extremes, but the missing middle tends to be more moderate.
It's a fact of life that there are no perfect jobs, and the difference between happiness and soul crushing is often about how you can deal with the negative sides of your job.
I would take Glassdoor with a few grains of salt.
Also, I've seen evidence of one employee posting multiple bad reviews. It's a bad system all around.
In my view, encouraging staff to speak honestly of their positive experiences with the company is a reasonable objective from a PR perspective (this is really a PR issue, not HR). Coercing such feedback of course would be unethical, but I think it's awfully presumptuous to assume any company was doing such just because some good reviews showed up with auspicious timing.
If there are only a few reviews for a company and those reviews are all over the map, I'm not going to put a lot of stock in any of them.
However, if there are a dozen or more reviews, most of which come across as fair and nuanced regardless of the score they assign, then I feel comfortable drawing some hypotheses based on the points they raise.
Also, companies can respond to reviews on Glassdoor. In more than one case the content of the (defensive) response has been more valuable to me than the original review.
I once got a bad review because I had the audacity to quiz a candidate that said they'd done work with databases before about SQL. We're talking 'what's the difference between INNER and OUTER JOIN' level of questions. They were interviewing for a position where they'd be expected to write plenty of SQL. At that moment I completely discounted Glassdoor.
Culture is also completely different from direction. Some place may have a great culture but a lack of direction, or vice versa.
I would say you should really see if there are reviews from all departments and if the number of reviews correlates to number of employees to paint a realistic picture.
One was positive, and it remains.
The negative review was removed.
I don't bother writing any reviews or using Glassdoor anymore.
And it is not just a review problem. Even for job interview questions, where I work we were unhappy that someone wrote a detailed and correct answer to a question we usually ask. HR emailed glassdoor and they removed the answer saying it didn't comply with ToS.
HR often plants or strongly encourages employees directly or through managers to post How Great Things Are Here. Negative reviews can go away mysteriously, are buried. It's disconcerting. A lot like Yelp.
I trust negative reviews more because if I had a good experience, I don't have any incentive at all to login to a webpage, create credentials if its needed and then go through the myriad of steps to post a positive review. But on the other hand, if I had a bad experience, the only way to vent it out is by giving them a bad review. I am willing to go through the hoops of signups and surveys so that I post that one bad review about the service. There is an incentive for me there.
Tailpiece: There are many services that you can purchase to write positive reviews for your company/service. The trend to identify this is that whenever there is a negative review, it gets buried by a bunch of near 5 star positive reviews, mostly with a one liner review text.
