As a marketer who helped manage various companies' reputation online, I can tell you that Glassdoor is pay-to-play. If you pay them the subscription fee, and you get negative reviews, whether "true" or not, you can challenge most and get them removed. I thought most people would understand their business model explicitly relies on getting companies to pay a fee to own their page (and in turn they have to keep those customers happy by removing reviews they don't like) but I continue seeing recruits relying on this site as if it's some unbiased source of info.
I can confirm this experience. At a previous job the management team (of which I was a member) would regularly review glassdoor reviews as part of our employee and candidate feedback. We had a healthy attitude toward employee satisfaction, but someone noticed you can flag a review as disputed (or "under review" or whatever the term is) and whilst it remains in this state, it is hidden from search results. Even for what I considered a team with a good attitude toward company culture, the temptation was too much and it soon became standard practice to flag every negative review asap. Some were unflagged after we reviewed them and we literally couldn't dispute the review but lots were just left as flagged.
The same practice is true of yelp and tripadvisor reviews.
For Tripadvisor, I see that my negative reviews from years ago (not that many - I am pretty easy to please, but occasionally a hotel or restaurant falls below even my low standards) are up and visible. It could be the owners just don't care but I also see a number of negatives on other properties I looked at. So I don't think this is the same.
When I logged in on mobile web Glassdoor forced me into a signup flow for something called Communities which included asking for my employment status. I was able to time a stop before the full page load and navigate to the account page.
Glassdoor is a completely flawed premise. Employers have almost complete compensation data and because we value anonymity more than ability to negotiate, our data is flawed. Employers might well directly know what you got paid at your previous company.
> At Pave, we spent the last two years building out a suite of 40+ integrations with HRIS, payroll, and equity management systems that connect directly with the source of truth for compensation data. We are thrilled to bring this technology to the Option Impact customer base and ensure that our combined customers will never have to fill out a manual survey again while gaining access to a persistent real-time network of compensation data.
> Option Impact is free to eligible and participating companies through our give-to-get model.
So if I understand correctly, almost all of our employers are providing our real time compensation data to an entity that then allows all other participant companies to graph and query.
I find it outrageous that my employer could tell my compensation data to other companies, while simultaneously we live in a culture of "we shouldn't talk about compensation."
In Norway you can lookup anyone's tax information. You can see who looks up your tax information, though, it is publicly available as long as you log on to government sites.
So basically everyone's salary from two years back is public information. It is often used by the press to check how much the richest people pay in taxes (or rather how badly they contribute by dodging taxes).
I've never heard of employers using it to check candidates' salaries, though. They usually just ask as part of the interview process.
> I've never heard of employers using it to check candidates' salaries, though. They usually just ask as part of the interview process.
As a Scandinavian employer, I can tell you that the tax records are very useful. Especially for higher-end roles it is very nice being able to check how much people have been earning from a reliable data source. I'm pretty sure many are using that a lot.
Norwegian tech salaries are relatively standardised and skew low (sometimes very low) by US standards, so certainly in a decent to good market there isn’t that much burning incentive for a company to volunteer themselves to the front page of VG just to save a handful of crowns.
Isn’t it illegal in the US for an employer to share your compensation data with third parties? Or do they skirt the rules by “anonymizing” it?
> we live in a culture of "we shouldn't talk about compensation."
Yeah especially now that the cat is out of the bag, but restricted to employers. Such a data set should absolutely be made available to workers. Information symmetry is critical for a functioning market. And capitalists love markets, right?
Yes, but merely a reflection and reminder of a dystopian reality that already permeated society long ago. It’s obvious that if they are allowed they would. The faster people drop the illusion that corporations[1] have emotions and “care” and such, the better people can protect themselves, organize and rebalance the scales I guess.
[1]: A generalization. There are more amoral, faceless self-perpetuating machines than just corporations, and there are many small- and medium sized companies that may be incorporated while maintaining human decency.
If I think I get paid more than you in the same role it's absolutely in my interest to keep that information from you. With departmental budgets in mind, you receiving a raise may limit the total compensation available to me when I negotiate my own.
> “i capponi di Renzo”, has become a proverbial admonition in Italian culture
> Renzo is carrying these poor capons (castrated male chicken) as his only means of payment to a well-off city lawyer, whom Renzo intends to hire... Manzoni (the author) notes that, had the capons been a little more intelligent, they would have started picking the hand that kept them captive, therefore regaining their freedom. Instead, the capons fought among themselves and ended up being delivered with great ease to their recipient.
You think you are in a zero sum relationship with your co-workers, but not your boss/company?
The word negotiation indicates two parties with conflicting interests reaching an agreement. You don't negotiate with your co-worker, you negotiate with an HR department. You are literally in conflict with your employer. Your employer benefits by paying you the minimum possible, and you benefit by being paid the maximum possible.
You and your co-worker benefit by breaking open the companies books and knowing how much they could be paying you but aren't.
It isn’t just your employers that are selling your compensation. Many give copies of W-2 and paystubs to companies that loan them money (e.g., for mortgages and auto loans). Some of these companies then sell this data to aggregators.
That is really shitty behaviour, and bizarre. Glassdoor is only feasible if users can have trust that their feedback is anonymous. I really hope this has not harmed anyone, I'd imagine the lower rated companies are most likely to retaliate.
The risk is not only retaliation by lower rated companies.
It may make users virtually unemployable if HR starts using Glassdoor as a database of publicly critical people. Given the choice between engineer 1 who never posted anything bad against a company, and engineer 2 who posted critical comments, who would you hire?
Agreed, but my point was that those that are lowest rated will likely have the worst cultures, and so would be *most likely* to retaliate. A company with a good culture would in theory be more likely to take any constructive feedback on board.
Being surrounded by "yes" people can only get you so far.
Although it probably gets you further than the opposite extreme where everyone disagrees all the time.
Personally having such info (critical reviews on previous employers) for a candidate, would be close to already having their answer for
"Tell me about a time you had a challenge/problem/conflict at work" type of interview questions.
It’s more dangerous than that. Even “good” companies use third party data and HR services to rank and disqualify applicants. If one of those services uses Glassdoor reviews as a signal even “good” employers could be unintentionally discriminating against applicants based on Glassdoor history.
Aren’t all the Yelps, Glassdoors and Trustpilots of the world all accepting money from companies to take down bad reviews and/or promote good-looking content? To the point of that being the main business model? I remember there used to be a lot of those claims coming up a few years ago, from credible sources.
I don’t trust any review sites these days, especially star ratings. At most I’ll skim through and look for what appears to be authentic reviews with quirky writing, shitty photos and such. However, that’s going away soon too, thanks to AI.
Yes, that is their business model -- it's surprising more people don't understand this. I know from experience regarding Trustpilot and Glassdoor specifically. FWIW, in my personal experience TrustPilot seemed to be a touch more interested in accuracy on managing the reviews, but that was a few years back.
Founder of small company. Of 16 reviews, only 1 is not fake. Really hard to believe they are mistakenly attached to my company. Many are negative, too.
Glassdoor also doesn't report actual income and wages in the field as a way to help lowball the brackets. I once saw it say a Senior Backend Developer was only worth 120K... I was shocked considering I know Amazon will pay you up to 250 with bonus.
> One user, who goes by Monica, wrote in a post on her personal blog that Glassdoor added her name and the city where she lives to her Glassdoor profile following an email exchange with Glassdoor customer support, despite having never provided her name during the sign-up process some years earlier. Monica, whose last name we’re not publishing to protect her privacy, accused Glassdoor of getting her full name from the email she sent to customer support, which she says they added to her Glassdoor profile.
Straight Talk wireless tirelessly attempted to get your mailing info and other such; any time you called them for any reason. It only took 2 questions before i went "do you need this? because you're not verifying anything i gave you before, since i didn't"
Classic mistake. This is why you should never type your real name into a website that you don't wan
>One user, who goes by Monica, wrote in a post on her personal blog that Glassdoor added her name and the city where she lives to her Glassdoor profile following an email exchange with Glassdoor customer support, despite having never provided her name during the sign-up process some years earlier
Wait, what.
This is just grotesque and unethical. You do NOT go around fixing other people's profiles. You do NOT edit other people's posts. This is a huge breach of trust for any platform that handles user inputted information.
I am delighted to share my incredible experience with the recovery company LINUX CYBER SECURITY that assisted me in recovering funds from a fraudulent investment scheme. After falling victim to a fake investment, I was devastated and unsure if I would ever see my hard-earned money again. However, upon reaching out to this recovery company, { info@linuxcybersecurity.com }
www.linuxcybersecurity.com }my hope was restored. Their team of experts demonstrated unparalleled skill and dedication in recovering various cryptocurrencies, including USDT, BTC, Ethereum, and even private keys.
Glassdoor added real names to supposedly anonymous profiles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777752 - March 2024 (23 comments)
Glassdoor is now adding real names to user profiles without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39769166 - March 2024 (40 comments)
Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39761176 - March 2024 (31 comments)
Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39705788 - March 2024 (310 comments)