Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

A particularly negative review of a London startup[0] by a former employee has been doing the rounds on social media recently. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of extremely positive reviews by current employees have suddenly cropped up for that company as well. So positive they feel a bit like HR plants. But then again, the original feels like a gleeful hatchet-job and is maybe a bit extreme going the other way.

Is Glassdoor reliable, and if not, are there any reliable alternatives?

[0] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Employee-Review-ROLI-RVW17219691.htm

It can be a red flag, but it is often not 100% of the truth.

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.

Yeah this is a very tricky thing to do well as it will always be abused. Glassdoor has been struggling (they've raised a bunch of flat rounds) and there are so many cases i've seen of bad reviews, followed by HR getting wind of it and burying them in a ton of fake positive reviews.

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?

Negative reviews seem to be pretty reliable, you have to have a motivation to post them, even if the content may not be objectively accurate. I worked for a company with terrible management and every time an employee would leave they would leave a negative review.

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.)

Companies definitely try to inflate their rankings with fake or forced reviews. But these are usually pretty easy to spot. They are often short vague 5-star reviews.

Read longer reviews and judge for yourself. Don’t trust the star ratings.