I'm not even talking about the "review-wall" requirement. The whole thing is garbage, the cities filter for example, it lists all the cities in the world!! you can't filter by country easily, and the filter don't stick from tab to tab, and you can barely search for sh*t, it's so clunky and bad it looks like it's a side project done by an intern.
I'm just so confused as to why it's the still by far the most popular website of its genre, I mean look at Twitter, it's a way more sophisticated enginereing product and with so much higher UX investments and it's getting destroyed by Threads soo fast the moment they started slipping.
Excuse the rant, I just don't get how there are no real alternatives to Glassdoor, I know levelsfyi exist and stuff similar to that, but nothing at the scale and breadth that Glassdoor covers
The companies that run these services contribute very little to their success. In fact many times they're popular in spite of the company. Think about how Yelp or Glassdoor will remove negative reviews if the business pays them, etc.
Just more landlords extracting value from things people create and enshittifying everything.
Reviews might be unnecessary if candidates can collectively gather up the data that shows if a company is actually hiring, and actually reviewing resumes, and actually responding to candidates with above-generic feedback.
The reason this data isn't collected and presented is that job sites and application tracking software make their money from companies. There isn't a site that makes money from candidates to counteract this force. The power imbalance between candidate and employer is tilted in favor of the employer.
If a job post showed there are 286 applicants for a job would you bother writing a cover letter? I wouldn't. I would move on to the job posting that responds promptly and has fewer candidates.
If a job post showed there are 100 applicants, the job posting has been open for 30 days, and there are zero resume reviews, would you bother applying to this job and others like it in this company? I wouldn't. It means the employer isn't really hiring or is disfunctional enough to announce a position without giving it attention.
I'd even be willing to pay the recruiter for their time giving me somewhat helpful not legally binding feedback like we think "you're overqualified", "you're missing an important skill", "we're not sure yet". If the recruiter starts generating revenue for the company, the company might hire more of them.
I'd also be willing to recommend my friends to good companies.
"We're the job board that forces you to jump through hoops to provide evidence of how active your hiring process is" isn't a sales pitch particularly likely to attract employers (in which case there's not much incentive for candidates to pay them either). And even if it did, it wouldn't replace Glassdoor' reviews - with all their inadequacies - for people that care more about whether the employer sounds better or worse than their current employer than whether they will get a job offer by the end of tomorrow.
Say you have a maps / direction software with a very large userbase and decide to add a rating feature to locations. Or perhaps you have a professional social network and you add a feature to rate your employer.
Why have a geofilter if the vast majority of people are logging into the site to see if anyone is talking shit about $COMPANY and the only way to make money is if $COMPANY pays you off to take those posts down?
One of those cases where distribution trumps product veracity. And to be fair, most people who use Glassdoor probably do still find it valuable (some information is better than no information).
Tangential point, but it's pretty crazy that Google can turn scores of companies to dust within seconds simply via search rank. Some sites that are > 70% search traffic: Genius, Yelp, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Quora, Urban Dictionary, Investopedia, Expedia, Glassdoor, IMDb
I think Glassdoor may have lost trust by giving too much access(?) to employers that paid $$ to control how their companies were reviewed
Someone certainly could challenge Glassdoor on the product front, but as other commenters have noted, they’d be pitted against a well-entrenched incumbent, prone to legal challenges, and stuck with a convoluted business model.
Glassdoor auth doesnt even work regularly. It has nothing to do with content, if a company cant figure out how to do auth on iOS, there is a serious problem.
Why? Do you believe it would accumulate spam and negativity because it's inexpensive for anyone to submit a review? What if there was a cost attached to posting a review?
Amazon reviews are a great example of all of these problems, I think.
If the reviews are about an employer, then there's a whole other level of problems with them. Perhaps the reviewer didn't get along with their manager and so have an honestly terrible opinion of the place, but really, the place is generally great. Or perhaps the opposite -- the reviewer got along wonderfully with their manager and so they're ignoring all sorts of real issues with that employer.
> What if there was a cost attached to posting a review?
I don't think that would help. It might even make things worse, because it would filter out more ordinary people and tilt the balance more towards paid reviewers.
I mean, I could be wrong here. But I've not yet seen a place that allows the general public to submit reviews where the reviews were helpful or accurate in terms of figuring out if the product or service is worth purchasing.
I could envision someone setting up forums on the darkweb to discuss the pros and cons of companies to mitigate some attribution but I do not see how anyone could make money unless they play ball with the big companies which renders the site pointless much like glassdoor as become. The money made would be from bribes from shady companies and then bigger companies might take the money away. Prior to GD was f'd company and I don't remember why they went away.
It did start that way but they had forums where we could talk about all the shenanigans going on without being censored. AFAIK this is not really the same on GlassDoor as they censor comments or at least I've seen multiple people stating their posts were censored.
Perfect username to reply to this btw
One way is to play ball with the candidates. A big casualty of the job search is the candidate because they deplete their savings while looking for a job. Companies on the other hand can afford to not spend the money on a hire, or delay hiring, or put job postings that aren't really hiring to keep up pretenses or as marketing or feel they're not losing anything. The candidate doesn't have a concentrated force to counteract this.
If candidates wised up it could get interesting. A web app that is the other half of LinkedIn could be there waiting to be discovered.
Both blind and levels are missing somethings though. Levels was just comp for the longest time but their forums are an attempt to move into this space. Blind has other issues with their user demographic and moderation imho - its a little too toxic at the moment to compete at the highest level. Theyre also too focused on tech and software careers alone.
See related discussion recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36634529
I think the problem is that there’s no good incentive for people to give real info. The best reviews aren’t written because people are busy doing good work at good companies.
Jobs aren’t common enough to stroke egos like restaurant and travel reviews (that also have review problems). So busy people don’t write many.
Company PR isn’t that valuable other than knowing they have money to spend on PR.
And people are angry for just and unjust reasons.
Compound that job titles aren’t standardized, even within companies so a pay difference may be due to different jobs, different performance, or just fabrication.
I get the info I wish Glassdoor had through networking. It’s hard and requires much labor but is accurate enough to recruit people, and, I expect, if I wanted to apply to a company.
The other thing I tried years ago was an app called blackball back when LinkedIn first opened their api, and has since blocked. Blackball let me and all my contacts enter the names of people we worked with who we hated and would never work with for any reason. The app would then let me search whether any of my contacts had blackballed a person and return something like “John Smith was blackballed by 0 1st degree and 5 2nd degree” and did it anonymously to the people querying and queried.
The app was pretty handy, but didn’t work without the LinkedIn api and I think was probably illegal. But it saved the frequent “hey old coworker, LinkedIn says you worked with John Smith, would you ever want to hire them again” checks that can be tricky because I only give a real answer to people I really trust. Blackball was simpler than recommending because it’s a bit more binary.
Tl;dr; it’s hard to get good info in this space
looks like you pay for advertisements of jobs, some more marketing features and some other crap
