I used to work at Desktop Metal which was (at the time) a pretty small startup here in Boston.
When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment.
At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company.
The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when I contacted Glassdoor they said there was no issue.
A week later my own review was removed for a generic content policy violation.
Goes without saying I don't trust Glassdoor for much.
I and other reviewers had left negative reviews for Cosuno Ventures GmbH as it's an incredibly toxic and horrible place to work in. I received a take-down notice from a German Google Maps review employee saying that Cosuno is claiming it's a false review and they don't know how who am I. Even though I worked at the company for 4 months with the CTO and had responded to the e-mail with documents signed by the CEO and CTO.
They're rocking a 5 star review now. I didn't receive a response from Google and my appeal has been ignored. I still have the company's t-shirt in the countryside.
I went to a pediatrician near where I lived. Long story short, she was very toxic, making ultimatums and giving what was revealed as dubious practice. I consulted other similar pediatricians, who all gave me radically different answers than hers.
As a result, I chose to write a detailed review explaining why I thought she was unprofessional, citing examples. Of course, my review got nuked.
Same happened with a photo shop that screw up a photo development for some films. I left a factual review, with a sample in pictures. I can see my review with my account, but no one else can.
Heh, one of my friends wrote a negative review about his landlord's Immobilien company. Got sued and had to pay him the amount of his deposit.
I bet I'd be at risk of getting sued in Germany even if I wrote a positive review about a company. The moment you post an opinion online you are opening yourself as a target.
Germany is not customer-review friendly. I got two legal threats over a non-descript 3-star google maps review of a deeply mediocre Restaurant for maliciously damaging their business reputation. Google made me provide receipts to prove I had been there.
I've experienced this almost verbatim - put up a factual (at least from my view) account of working with a previous employer, a "warts and all" review. Next week I see about ten 5-star reviews each with a single sentence something like "This is a great place to work!".
However, when searching out the low-down on a potential new employer, I only read the one and two star reviews - if they're pretty spurious then I feel more comfortable taking a role there. If however the poor reviews contain lots of pretty specific complaints, I find them more believable that the single sentence "everything is awesome here" style reviews.
No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive reviews.
Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.
Actually you are right, sorry. I was exaggerating but it is true that it is mostly the naive/average users of internet that do place any significant credibility in online reviews
Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?
Not a review site, but networks of people I trust directly is about the only thing that works. As soon as this grows beyond the trust I have in the network, the proxy trust tapers off quickly. That's the problem with something like glassdoor.
That’s why the most lucrative thing is to get people to ‘connect’ their networks digitally on social media and manipulate them. I hope we see a return to irl networks
https://www.productreview.com.au/ is the only site I've ever seen that does a good job at user reviews. Each review has to be accompanied by a verifiable receipt.
Interesting but not relevant here - they require a photo of a physical receipt, and they're hand reviewed. Anything is scammable given enough effort though, no doubt.
that’s exactly the amazon scam, executed with a verified receipt and “hand reviewed”. or did you mean, manually moderated? that’s no obstacle.
for amazon the receipt is guaranteed authentic as the product will have been verifiably purchased on amazon. for a 3p site receipts can be trivially fabricated
Consumer Reports has well known biases though, which colors their reviews. For example, they tend to rank American car companies unfairly low. Their vehicle issue score isn't weighted - trouble linking phone to infotainment is the same as engine exploding. Cars with more tech -> lower scores, even if they're mechanically flawless.
Honda has moved down their rankings due to reliability problems with their infotainment systems. Lumping transmission failure at 50,000 miles with some audio system breaking is too coarse.
Wouldn't that set up a conflict of interest for the review site? I'd trust such a site even less than normal (and normal is pretty close to not at all).
Sure, in kind of the same way that steam has a conflict of interest with reviews for games. But I tend to trust steam reviews at least generally, in fact more than I do most reviews on products I am looking at.
It is possible to exist in this space with a potential conflict, as long as you position yourself appropriately. If your interest is to serve "decent" companies by providing them with interested candidates, it can work.
It'll work fine until the site decides chasing profit is more important than integrity of the system, so probably right around the time they're looking for more funding.
At the same time, unfortunately we will have a hard time finding companies that will actually thrive on that website, since a staggering majority of them are just ridden with crooks in the management layer and above.
True, though this should increase the value of the listings that remain. Companies that can hold their own here gain the value of being respected in the community.
Yes. With a paid subscriber base and no advertising their interests would be aligned with the reader's. If you're not paying for the review they will ultimately build loyalty toward their funders.
It's not so much that I'd read the reviews, but ranking of results is fatally flawed thanks to these practices.
For many queries (restaurant in town X, book in genre Y) there are simply so many candidate results that ranking is the one and only thing to determine a (much, MUCH) smaller candidate set that the customer might actually engage with. How often do you click through to page 2 of your search results?
At a healthcare tech startup I worked at for every negative review we got management made us write three positive reviews. The owners daughter would get all of her friends from college to write more and more positive reviews.
It was so obvious, any fake review written by HR will always have "keep doing what you're doing!" in the "advice to management" section. Like, even a moderately happy employee will actually have something to say in the "advice to management" section. Only a shill will say, "Keep doing what you're doing!"
I swear the 'keep doing what you're doing' must either be the standard HR planted review (I wasn't invited to the HR conference where they learned that!), or it's GD's own spam for pay. I've seen that too frequently at toxic jobs for it to be coincidence.
Luckily, just like Amazon reviews, it's pretty easy to determine worthwhile info from how specific and balanced it is. The aggregate scores are obviously worthless, because either shills or spurned employees taint the mix.
I enjoy when there are responses from the business: that can often show egotistical management that thinks their poo doesn't stink.
Heard the same from a friend of a friend, they would game Trip Advisor reviews by giving discounts to customers and the daughter would make accounts and leave positive reviews all the time.
There seriously needs to be a watchdog group or AI service (startup idea!) that vets reviews with heuristics like anomaly detection for VPN ip address reviews in succession or browser fingerprinting.
Also ChatGPT is gonna make writing unique reviews a thing of the past. Expect fake reviews sounding indistinguishable from genuine human writing. We are screwed.
I definitely believe that. Years ago, I had an interview scheduled with a bank’s IT department. Checked their Glassdoor page and it was littered with negative reviews, with obviously fake positive reviews peppered in.
I took the interview anyway because I really needed work at the time. Got some 1-on-1 time with the IT guys and the first thing they said was,
“You read the reviews on Glassdoor, didn’t you?” “Yes..”
“Well, don’t worry, IT is pretty isolated from all that”
Cool, I guess?
Next, I got some time with a VP. He saw on my resume that I’d done some work for a Christian church. He said,
“Yeah, I love to debate religion at the water cooler!”
Had he taken some time to get to know me, he’d know I’m not religious and probably would have held his tongue.
I got offered the job. Naturally, I didn’t take it.
Like others have said, Glassdoor is good to see problem spots in negative reviews. Positive reviews are meaningless in my eyes.
For reference, the bank was called Bank of Internet at the time. They’ve since rebranded to Axos and I continue to recommend against them. I know nothing about their financial credibility, but I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.
> I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.
This is likely some cultural issue (I'm not from the United States), but I don't get what some person of power who loves debating religion at the water cooler makes the company a hostile work environment. Quite the opposite: in my gut feeling the fact that religion (a topic that has a tendency to cause heated discussions) can be discussed at the water cooler is rather a point of evidence that the work environment is really healthy.
Yes, this is the issue I have with all the comments on this thread saying that glassdoor has too many good reviews for a company that the commenter knows is "toxic". I have no idea what "toxic" means to the commenters here. Then I finally see an issue concretely identified: toxic can mean manager expresses an interest in "debating religion at the water cooler"? So what?
I also wouldn't generalize from this poster's anecdote to conclude "This is likely some cultural issue" in the US. I guess religion is a touchy subject in the US compared to more homoegenous nations like in the EU, and a rule of thumb I'd always heard is to avoid it in the office. (They used to say the same thing about politics in the office but that definitely went out the window these last 10 years.)
Religion is a legally protected class in the US, and the fact that a boss would willingly want to discuss, much less debate it with a subordinate opening the business up to much unnecessary liability is a red flag at least for stupid leadership.
Worst case scenario, the boss is trying to discriminate based on religion, and trying to find out more about the subordinate’s personal beliefs. Best case scenario, boss is for whatever reason curious, but displays lack of knowledge of labor laws and best practices (in the context of asking to discuss with a newbie who they have no prior relationship with).
After a working relationship had been established, I could see religion as a as a casual topic being reasonable depending on how what their relationship is like, but as an introduction? Forget about it.
Really? How would European business culture approach this? I feel like talking about debating religion when it’s not relevant to a potential employee is extremely short sighted or some type of backhanded mind game; it just doesn’t seem normal to say that at a job interview. After a working relationship has been established if it comes up, that is different, but if the VP just says that based on seeing a potential employee’s work with a church, it’s quite suspect.
I'd happily talk religion, trans rights, racism etc with anyone at work.
But then I'm not paranoid , and Ive never worked anyplace in 20 years where I feel people are being dishonest or disingenuous or playing any sort of games. especially not mind games, that's fucking absurd to me that you would even think that at all.
What sort of people are you working for, that sounds like hell.
I've always been in offices, and worked for managers I've gone and got drunk with and talked about all sorts of shit. it's never been an issue.
If US office culture Is as you describe it, it sounds fucking awful.
All those topics sound like minefields I would be cautious discussion even with good friends, and then only if we have similar views. If I knew there would be a significant disagreement I would drop the topic probably, avoids more trouble.
I think it’s about minimizing liability. I wouldn’t want a work dynamic to turn toxic due to a coworker’s prejudice or some disagreement we had debating over the water cooler. At work you focus on work, sure you can have some chit chat but generally these topics are breached after being acquainted with someone.
I’d say Consumer Reports and NYT wire cutter are pretty objective…
Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn’t change much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019 are probably still good now, which is boring.
To be fair, most of the alternatives are garbage, but also most of Kryptonite’s own products are garbage. There are ~3 worthwhile bike locks on the market. 2 of them are made by Kryptonite. The rest provide the same value as the TSA. Mostly theatrical.
On youtube there are videos from an expert lockpicker, I can't remember the name, where he goes on lockpicking kryptonite locks. He explains in great detail what he expected more from the high end, but his recommendation by the end was still a kryptonite lock, not necessary the ultimate, and said that unless you are ready to lose the bike, unless it's in sight, there is very little you can do.
And with an angle grinder you are doomed either way
Glassdoor removed all of my reviews after submitting a negative view about 1 company. Previous reviews had been mostly positive or just neutral with provable facts.
Having seen their internal Blind, social Slack channels and culture vs. the Glassdoor reviews, and then submitting my review which really "went against the grain" of Glassdoor, it was clear there was something going on. I just didn't care enough to find out.
As these systems age, I think they're all missing one feature - "what are ratings or reviews from the past 6 months".
My favorite thing about glassdoor is that I've had employers use their pay scales for negotiations. Which of course are many years old at this point. Needless to say I rejected their offer.
A blockchain based solution can be developed for customer reviews. If your cryptographically signed and verifiable review went and sat on the disk of every computer on the planet, there will be no options to manipulate it.
Yeah except there would still be a mechanism for revoking or moderating bad reviews because people would use the platform to review bomb any company they took issue with. The review might still be on the chain's history, but the moderation tool would still be created with good intentions, with a new transaction on a later block that basically revokes the "validity" of the bad review. Similar mechanisms can be seen in NFTs, where you can update the NFTs metadata.
But those "seven positive" reviews will still show up! When I was calculating the NPS scores at a former job, IIRC you need seven or eight 100% scores to offset one low score. Interesting that's what happened to the Desktop Metal poster.
But (presumably) those seven posters would be motivated by big tech money and thus be identified by some algorithm or the other in that blockchain? And/or you being a genuine reviewer would have a more organic activity across the blockchain with other products too compared to theirs and that will add to the weight?
There's just very little organic activity on a site like Glassdoor. You changing jobs, and thus naturally having any kind of inclination to post something may be few and far between, and you might not even think of uploading a review unless you're disgruntled (read: motivated).
I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic.
And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading.
Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the salary column it will show a number which is designed to suggest a number of salary data elements available. Honestly I cannot say what that number actually means as it seems to have no value at all. Specifically, it will say 5 or 8 or some other small but non-zero number... and yet there are zero visible salary records for the company (even if you are a contributor of information and thus deemed to be allowed to view other information on the site).
I expect Glassdoor is like the many dating sites on the internet - full of fluff and false/artificial information so the site appears to be valuable and worth visits.
If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.
I saw a glassdoor salary range for a job at my company. I know that the internal range is 50-100% higher than what glassdoor suggests. And then I wonder why no one's applying. Companies should just publicly advertise compensation.
https://www.levels.fyi/ is a grest site for actual salary information on tech related jobs. The data reported very much matched my last round of interviews and the data granularity is good, being able to see levels, location, pay breakdowns, and even dates when the salary was posted.
I have found that the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics is a comprehensive and unparalleled treasure trove of current, accurate salary information, and much much more. (US jobs only, natch.)
BLS is a tremendous resource but how are you using information at the NAICS-level to inform jobseeking or job hiring? It seems fascinating from an aggregate point of view but less useful for pricing employment positions.
Aren't all these sites limited by (and biased by) the selection of offer data they collect? Unless they are working directly with payroll companies to obtain a uniformly random sampling of offers, they're not going to be accurate. What incentivizes employees who get below-average offers and companies who give below-average offers to share that data with these salary sites?
Example: Everyone who even knows someone who makes $500K at Facebook seems to love posting about it here, but nobody who makes $100K there seems to feel the need to boast about it.
That's a reasonable distinction but just look at the data itself.
There are tons of low level employees posting their salaries. If you work in those roles, that data could be more valuable to a candidate than Glassdoor's amorphous projections.
I think the user behavior that facilitates this is the same behavior you see represented on Blind.
Levels allows HR departments to post their actual salary bands, which they're normally more than happy to do. So you're not just relying on user reported data. They're also incentivized to do it because they want compensation benchmarking information (big companies want to know how much their competitors are paying so they can calibrate their own bands to market rate).
They have their own job advertisement business and they partner with third party recruiting companies to get anonymous data about offers candidates receive.
They also just take having accurate compensation information seriously so they do things like outlier and forgery detection as well as seeming to have a much better algorithm for processing the information they receive.
I remember working at a company that got frequently mentioned as “one of the best places to work in CITY”, and a few months into my tenure one of the HR employees circulated the website to go vote for our company on the “best places to work in CITY” website.
I think Glassdoor is basically grievances by employees, some of whom are unreasonable, and fake counter-reviews by HR/marketing. I generally just look at the complaints and gauge how unrealistic they sound.
This. Also, some details are useful if seen statistically: details about work / life balance, intensity of employee turnover, particular broken processes. When they are not the centerpiece of a review, and you see them in 10 reviews, they likely correlate with something.
Of course, reviews like "all good, none bad" or "all bad, the worst" are not informative.
Some interesting data can be gleaned about salaries, or the interview process. But, again, it needs to be taken as statistics, not as honest detailed descriptions.
Yes, I don’t understand how someone who is basically content with their employer decides they’re going to write a Glassdoor review. Why bother, you have better things to do. But if you’re pissed you might. Most reviews are glowing and decidedly fake or really negative.
Glassdoor generates revenue through advertising and 'employer branding solutions'. Companies looking to advertise their job listings and showcase their reputation are charged for these services.
Reviews in general have grown unreliable as incentive alignments have shifted.
I once worked at a company that started getting a slew of bad Glassdoor reviews. The reviews were real; the company leadership had been making some bad choices and the reviews reflected it. So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews.
> So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews.
I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, provided there was nothing forcing them to be positive or repercussions for not doing it (or for leaving a negative review).
Most people review things only at the extremes (usually negative) unless they are prompted. That’s why Amazon sends people emails with questions or asking for a review.
If a company asks their employees to leave positive reviews, and the employees generally like the place and are willing, that seems OK to me. I’ve lived in apartments that have done this and noticed when looking at reviews for others that they must have done the same.
> If a company asks their employees to leave positive reviews, and the employees generally like the place and are willing, that seems OK to me.
Yeah, it doesn't seem OK to me. The power differential is such that there's no way for a company to ask that of employees without the employees feeling like they have to make the review positive, or less negative than they otherwise might have. So I consider such reviews highly unreliable. That companies do this sort of thing is one of the reasons why I think reviews are pretty close to worthless.
My last company sent out multiple “Please leave a positive review on Glassdoor” emails as we were trying to hire more. I never felt actually pressured to leave a review, positive or not, from those requests. I didn’t (and it would not have been a positive one, if I did at that particular point in my tenure) and there were no repercussions. There were a few negative reviews added at the time, but there’s no way of knowing if those were a response to the email or not. This was a large company, so maybe that matters to how people feel about it.
And then there are the fake reviews left by shady reputation management services. $previous_company (which was very small) had many negative reviews pop up in a short time frame, which at first was thought to be a disgruntled employee making multiple accounts, but then a reputation management service "came to the rescue" just at the right time and offered to get them removed. IIRC, Glassdoor did actually remove these eventually after being contacted, but whoever offered to get them removed was told to fuck off.
Glassdoor is a hellscape for employees and employers. Current and former employees can write literally anything they want, true or false, and it gets published. Employers have no cause for recourse except apparently paying people to write fake reviews. So a brand can be damaged by fake reviews or lies in reviews, and have to go through backchannels to fix it. It's basically a place for legal libel and puts everyone in a worse spot. I never trust Glassdoor.
This is surprisingly pro-corporate take. This same argument could be made for literally anywhere that people provide feedback on anything. In such cases I tend to favor the interests of the least powerful rather than the interests of the most powerful.
That certainly is one way to try and pick a side, but in practice it's no better than flipping a coin.
Anytime you hear one side of the story, we'll you're hearing one side of the story. Most situations are not black and white, most have context and nuance.
I've seen employees leave because the company behaved badly. I've seen employess leave when they behaved badly. I've seen situations where both sides had legitimate complaints.
Obviously no person posts something like "they fired me cause I'm a dick". But plenty of people do get fired for perfectly valid reasons. Companies will very seldom talk about firings publically, it's too dangerous to do so. So basically just be aware that people who have been fired are, well, unreliable witnesses to how that came about.
Of course there are plenty of bad companies. It eould be good yo know who they are. Im not sure employee reviews from ex-workers is meaningful. I -know- reviews from current employees is not meaningful. Which makes the value of review sites questionable.
I left a review on the BBB, when I was a student, after being promised a gift card for a video interview of a product for one of the large tech companie's PMs.
I refused a free trial or some other token offer by a call center employee that the company sent as part of the BBB resolution process.
Not long after,the BBB removed my review even though I offered email evidence between the PM and I. I emailed one of their managers asking for an explanation for why they removed it. They gave me some vague boilerplate that didn't address the issue.
Because they weren't clear in their communication with me on the reasons why, I couldn't help but wonder whether they had some similar incentive in their relationships with certain companies to remove problematic reviews.
The BBB is geared for companies, if you have an open issue, it becomes a back and forth ping pong match to see who can outlast each other. Companies HR will respond to the BBB update, they wear you out, and it gets closed as resolved.
Its not.
Its utterly useless.
Same goes for some state agencies, file a complaint, but turns into a response back and forth, until someone finally gives up responding, and default closed.
Systems are designed to make you give up and go away.
Once I requested an insurance reimbursement for a transportation expense of about $20.00, on the basis that their chosen service failed me that night.
The reimbursement was denied, so I appealed. COVID lockdowns were active, and the petty bureaucrat on charge of my appeal barely knew how to use her phone. She said the request was denied due to illegible documentation, which was bullshit.
They announced that the appeal was still undecided, but they wanted to grant themselves an extension of several weeks to study it more closely. I appealed the extension, and presently I was mailed a check for the full amount.
How much is your time worth? Is $20 worth an hour of wrangling bureaucracy?
I would log into the BBB couple times a week and respond, "Still not resolved, did not receive refund", and click the "not resolved". The business would reply "We sent the check", after 90 days, I didnt log in for a week, auto closed as resolved.
I have operated a organigram app for the past 5 years. One of the bigger user segments is these so called ORM agencies. They use the app to keep track of their large "teams", assign tasks, etc. A team can be as large as 12,000 members
At first I didn't know what to think. Then I learned that their teams are mostly made up of illiterate people who need a few bucks to survive. I don't blame them. Online reviews are useless, if you need to know something ask someone you know, don't just take the opinion of someone on the griftnet
He mentions ChatGPT in passing but you could write a whole separate article about that. These bogus review companies are going to be able to pump out so many more reviews, of higher quality, with access to LLM-generated content. This problem is only going to get even worse.
To me the entire idea of Glassdoor is fundamentally flawed so there is a part of me that can't exactly blame for things like this going on.
It has been shown time and time again that most people won't go out of their way to leave a positive review for something and will only make the effort when they want to complain.
Mix this with something like a job where generally the only reason people will leave is likely due to something negative going on (while I don't have numbers to back this up, I would not think that most are leaving because they are simply not learning anything new and feel like they are done where they currently are. But maybe I am wrong about this assumption?).
So the people leaving would only have negative views that strongly skew the actual appearance of how a job may be.
I have left 3 Glassdoor reviews (once for an interview that was so bad I walked out) and all of them negative. But for 2 of them if I look back honestly I realize that much of what I was leaving for was not an issue for the entire company and was more specific to my team.
That doesn't mean that those negative reviews are not valuable, they are. But I don't think they really paint a good picture, I know I don't trust it if I am looking at a company knowing both what I mentioned and what is mentioned in this article.
Hmm that ChatGPT review doesn't sound like it was written by a real human either. Because it's in corporatese not English.
And back to Glassdoor, they seem to be desperate for reviews? Maybe non fake? I wanted to check a company last month so I went to them and found out you now have to register. Alright, I made the effort. Then they didn't let me see anything before I uploaded a review of my current job.
I don't know if this is to prevent fakes but they lost me, at least for now.
I'm old enough to remember when "the wisdom of the crowd" on collaborative web sites was going to solve all our problems, but every platform that could have delivered on such a promise has sold their soul to make an extra buck from people gaming their systems, and killed the golden goose in the process. The only reviews I trust are on Steam, and even then, I take them with a grain of salt.
Glassdoor's model suffers from intrinsic problems such that... it's hard to imagine a site as it could ever work well for a sustained period of time before becoming a target for abuse.
It also seems inevitable that such sites, will exist. Can you really blame Glassdoor here? Are they supposed to do a thorough investigation for every review? At least it gives some sort of weak signal about the place.
The society as a whole would benefit from more information transparency (in the job market and several other areas) but the economic incentives just don't align to make this happen.
Which is kinda funny because the free market itself is advertised based on how great it is - when there's information transparency.
Isn't it fairly widely known that the overall Glassdoor rating isn't worth looking at, and that short and wildly positive (or short and negative) individual reviews aren't useful either, because of the widespread fake review problem. Usually the ones clearly written by humans with real knowledge of the company are a little longer and contain particular story snippet that will add to the credibility. In my experience those skew toward the negative however, as I would mentally discard short positive reviews more frequently even if genuine, being so hard to distinguish from paid or incentivised corporate hr-wash.
Despite high turnover, and lots of complaints, my last company had one of the highest Glassdoor ratings I'd ever seen> How? Simple, they'd pay their employees to do so.
In my last role, I built an education reviews site at scale — challenge is remaining objective given that your audience are actively airing the dirty laundry of your paying customers. Commercially it didn’t stack up, so we had to monetise the traffic through display ads.
Same case with Glassdoor — dissing paying customers through your audience is never good for business.
> And I’d say that the above answer [from chatgpt] was better than 95% of the fake reviews I came across.
Perhaps this is because the easily identifiable fake reviews are poorly written? The real question is how many fake reviews are good enough to avoid detection?
I was too afraid to leave an accurate/bad review of my previous employer because the CEO was petty and litigious. I don't trust glassdoor to keep me anonymous.
Plus I already knew that HR was producing good reviews to drown out the bad ones.
Seems like Blind should get in on this game, since the premise of the app is that it requires a company email address. Use an LLM to extract insights from the comments and give them to prospective job hunters for a small fee, or even just run ads.
We had a nasty review from one ex employee and in Germany it was easy to find a cheap lawyer/agency who wrote a letter to glassdoor demanding removal and a few days later the negative review was gone.
How are there no watchdog groups who can be the intermediary and rule against companies playing dirty with reviews, short of filing a lawsuit and using a judge? Like a BBB with teeth.
The real 4D chess move is fake negative reviews of your own company that are so unreasonable in content they cast doubt on other negative reviews.
This seems like an unsolvable problem with online reviews in general. However I generally find Google Maps reviews for restaurants fairly reliable. You'd think with the amount of data they slurp up they could cut out fake reviews based on location data alone. Maybe it's just confirmation bias on my end though.
For something like Glassdoor, the problem is you risk being fired if you identify yourself and the info leaks or is sold. Can you trust them not to sell it?
Exactly. Do you really want to trust your ability to keep paying your bills to Glassdoor's infosec? In return for nothing but the satisfaction of speaking your mind to an audience of non-responsive strangers?
When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment.
At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company.
The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when I contacted Glassdoor they said there was no issue.
A week later my own review was removed for a generic content policy violation.
Goes without saying I don't trust Glassdoor for much.