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Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

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Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#21
I'm not surprised.

If you're interested in looking up the pros that a company has to offer, then Glassdoor is great.

If you're interested in the cons, then you have to go into Glassdoor knowing that information can be manipulated and/or inflated.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#23

I'm not surprised. If you're interested in looking up the pros that a company has to offer, then Glassdoor is great. If you're interested in the cons, then you have to go into Glassdoor knowing that information can be manipulated and/or inflated.

I go into it thinking the opposite. Reviews clearly written by management or someone trying to paint a better picture of the company than there really is. Cons can still be misleading but I’d be more weary of a fake positive review than a negative one. Maybe I’m being gamed too.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#24

This article kind of misses the entire point; Glassdoor and the rest of these "professional review" sites sell reputation management services to the company. They use the negative reviews to push other high margin services to the companies. The only one who should care about Glassdoor being gamed is Glassdoor executives; anyone looking for a honest and balanced review of a company workplace on Glassdoor is already ge…

Their policy on negative reviews seems pretty decent.

https://help.glassdoor.com/article/I-m-an-employer-What-can-...

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#25
I saw that at my old company. All of the people who left our office gave scathing reviews but all of the people who remained mostly from the main office, gave great reviews.

Of course the company ignored the bad reviews but thanked everyone who gave great reviews.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#27

I'm not surprised. If you're interested in looking up the pros that a company has to offer, then Glassdoor is great. If you're interested in the cons, then you have to go into Glassdoor knowing that information can be manipulated and/or inflated.

Unless the complany can delete or edit previously posted reviews, I feel like I can still use the site to find valuable information.

If they can do that - game over, Glassdoor is useless. But I am capable of filtering through some fluff to get the honesty.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#28
post #4

This happened at my previous company when they had bad glassdoor reviews. Every new person through the door, was sort of forced to write a glassdoor review. They would be given a nice welcome, some schwag, sell them on the company. People inevitably wrote good reviews, alas once the honeymoon period ended, they were in for a rude shock.

But when the people left they changed their review to something awful no? I mean, in the long run such behavior should not work.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#30
The whole online referral "industry" piggy backs on people's old instinct: if another person says it's good, I'll probably like it too. This might have worked in the village.

Before you had online reviews, people were stuck with either newspaper product reviews, in which case there would be a paper name and a writer's name attached, or celebrity endorsements, where at least you knew they were being paid.

With online reviews, even with real names, the person is as good as anonymous to you. There's no knowing their motivations, and you have to shake your old instinct to trust social proof. This is not as easy as it sounds because it's probably deeply ingrained in people.

Nowadays I rarely believe any kind of online review, and it's a bit tragic. I'm sure there's a lot of honest ones there, but a few bad apples...

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