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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

#341

Post by b_t_s »

jecxjo wrote: post #283
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core hours sounds like a more sensible policy to me.

Core hours worked well for me, until one office decided that their core hours would change due to high traffic. Suddenly an office that was only an hour earlier than mine was now leaving just after lunch. I had an office that was 11.5hrs off and we had a great setup where I would do night meetings one week and they would the other. The office an hour off of mine could never get their shit together to schedule meeting…

Core hours _should_ mean the core of the day, about 10 to 4, not whenever to whenever.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#342

Post by withdavidli »

raverbashing wrote: post #59
rashomon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same business model as the Better Business Bureau and Yelp. It's a manufactured perspective. As a devil's advocate, how can a company expect to be viewed impartially if the only folks who review them have tempers raged enough to motivate them to leave a poor review in the first place? How can I, a potential employee, trust said-reviewer wasn't let go due to Silo'd mismanagement, personal issues or a company…

You need to leave a review if you want to access the data in the site. This motivates people to leave a (neutral) review. So it is not all ranting, and I'd say most companies have good (realistic) scores and reviews

They don't check if you actually worked for the place reviewed. You can leave a review for any company to gain access. Sorry GameStop, for my neutral review even though I never worked there.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#343

Post by mushufasa »

Animats wrote: post #197

This is a great opportunity for a union. The organization that should be running a site like Glassdoor is the AFL-CIO.

I agree there should be some opportunity for them to participate somehow. Any ideas of what that would look like?

ALF-CIO and other unions aren't setup to be tech companies themselves, and I don't think they have the internal talent to build and operate a popular web app well on their own. It would have to be some other way for them to interact with a tech company in a mutually beneficial manner.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#344

Post by clarky07 »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #17
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #6

Is there any service that actually is fair? When Ubisoft makes Forbe's "Best Places to Work" I don't feel like I can trust anything to make an objective measure other than organic word of mouth and simply experiencing it for myself.

It's the natural cycle of the internet. 1. Be a nobody company 2. Utilize generous user content to build up an important knowledge-base/economy 3. People begin to trust the information in the system and come to rely on it 4. Sell-out entirely and make a lot of money letting people buy influence 5. People abandon the site realizing it has no signal anymore (Digg, Reddit, Amazon, Glassdoor, experts-exchange, facebook,…

I mostly agree with your analysis, but I think your examples don't actually fit. Please show me all the people abandoning google and amazon.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#345

Post by strictnein »

freedomben wrote: post #142
gtirloni wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their policy on negative reviews seems pretty decent. https://help.glassdoor.com/article/I-m-an-employer-What-can-...

I thought that too, except for this: > Ask Your Employees to Leave More of Them. We encourage you to ask your employees to leave honest reviews on Glassdoor. I personally see this as manipulating and watering down. It's not an ethical problem IMHO, but I'd rather hear from the people that were motivated enough by their love or hate to go out and leave a review. Also as an employee, I've had an employer ask me to leav…

Previous employer (a large division of a very large software company) had signs up in our offices that actively encouraged reviews.

The selling point was that it would help make it easier to get quality coworkers. Kind of made sense, but it was still shady.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#346

Post by mushufasa »

redm wrote: post #219

We know what Glassdoor is supposed to do, but it doesn't because the incentives for Glassdoor aren't aligned with its mission. Their real customers are companies that are willing to pay to have good reviews/ratings. They tell you as much if you have ever contacted them about a review problem. For a site like a Glassdoor, to be honest, its customers need to be the job seekers or the job seekers + and the companies. Ad…

I think you've nailed the problem.

What's the solution? (I have no affiliations with Glassdoor, I'm just curious).

I don't think you can charge jobseekers to use the site (they are looking for a job, after all). It has to be free to use by the end user.

How can you build a business that aligns revenue with the end-user incentives, when the end-users are unlikely to pay directly?

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#347

Post by dlubarov »

everybodyknows wrote: post #298
dlubarov wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Yelp advertising has no effect on reviews. Allegedly some sales reps claimed that they could manipulate reviews, but such claims would have been empty threats/promises. This has been tested in court several times; see e.g. the 9th circuit's opinion on Levitt v. Yelp! Inc: > the business owners pled insufficient facts to make out a plausible claim that Yelp authored negative reviews of their businesses (I intern…

> ... no effect on reviews Looking now at the web UI, can you offer any insight into how "Yelp sort" -- the default -- decides which reviews to push out the back pages?

I didn't actually work on the systems that score reviews and filter out certain ("not recommended") reviews, so I'm not sure what signals went into them. I would guess recency, photos, account age/reputation, etc.

I had some other reasons for believing it was impossible for sales reps to manipulate review scores, but my memory is very foggy since this was ~9 years ago. Sorry if I made it sound like I had more insider knowledge; I edited that out of my comment.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#348

Post by hinkley »

commandlinefan wrote: post #77
sevensor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flexibility works one way there A former boss put it like this, "Sure we have flex time! You can arrive any time before 8 and leave any time after 6."

Let me guess, he laughed when he said it like he was super funny, too, right? Like when I used to ask one former boss which of the ten tasks he'd just assigned to me was highest priority he'd say, "yes!" and laugh like he'd just told the greatest joke and then run out of the room (seriously) before I could pin him down on an actual decision.

Agile coach I know noticed that when you turn the question around and ask on a scale of 1-5 how pissed they will be if you don’t get each done, you get some 3’s and 4’s which lets you prioritize things that are all priority 5.

(I like severity as a sorting mechanism too, which is 3 dimensions of data then)

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#349

Post by chongli »

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #32

I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. I extensively reviewed the rules and reworded my comments and they were removed yet again. My points were fully factually true and were not anything too untoward (pay raises were promised to members of a new team, they never materialized, most team members left). For what it's worth, Path Forward IT is…

This tells me that Glassdoor is completely untrustworthy, just like Yelp.

I wish there was some sort of business model for an honest review site that protected against this sort of naked corruption. Does anyone have any ideas?

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#350

Post by empath75 »

mindcrime wrote: post #47

My approach to Glasdoor reviews is similar to my approach to Amazon reviews... ignore the positive reviews, and focus on the negative ones. Now, "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", but a large number of negative reviews is a strong "stay away" signal. A small number of negative reviews is, more or less regardless of the positive reviews, a "neutral" indicator to me.

I don’t go by the quantity, I look at the details of negative reviews. If the worst complaints are just nitpicks or the negative reviewers seem like someone I wouldn’t want to work with, I usually think the company is pretty good.
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