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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#101

Post by berkes »

nickbauman wrote: post #80
everdrive wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.

We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. The Internet as a great "disintermediation" medium is over.

From this I get you mean "word of mouth" in a very physical way? As in "my cousin Jane says..."?

Because "Word of mouth" over the internet would imply that The Internet still has a big role to play in disintermediation.

Would "reviews" from your network, any network, physical, or digital, of people you know, be valuable? I believe that a "review" is only useful if you know the reviewer well enough. Regardless of the medium.

For example, when "angry uncle Joe" rants about some libtard-foreigner-restaurant-scum which is ruining the neighborhood with their horrible foreign food, I know how to take that 'review' of the restaurant. Same when aunt Carol explains how she heard from the new boyfriend of the cousin of Foo that her brother said that she heard from.. and so on. But when a friend who knows a lot about fintech explains that SomeBank is really doing a lot of interesting tech and hiring, I also know how to take that.

If you know who the "review" comes from, you can trust it. Otherwise you cannot. I assume this comes down to "word of mouth", though.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#102

Post by colinmhayes »

mywittyname wrote: post #91

You can't trust ratings that you aren't paying to read. The business model for these review sites are all the same: be useful for long enough to corner the market, then institute a pay-to-clean policy. Sprinkle in a few fake negative reviews for those tough to close leads. The revenue they can extract for the businesses listed on their sites is much higher than what they could achieve through ad revenue alone.

The dark web markets actually figured out a good way to solve reviews. 1. Only people who bought a product can review it. 2. the review includes how much was paid. 3. Heavily encourage everyone who buys the product to review it.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#103

Post by monoideism »

cj wrote: post #24

In response to people in this thread claiming Glassdoor will remove reviews if you pay them: Maybe our company was just unlucky with the sales rep assigned to our profile, but altering reviews was something they made clear would not happen regardless of if we paid or not. At the time our company was getting negative reviews meant for a different company in a different country with a similar name. It was a major hassl…

> IMO they shouldn’t allow reviews on public company profiles until there is a critical mass of reviews such that any 1 review won’t dramatically swing the star rating

Are you this accomodating towards potential employees? Such as, if a potential employee got a single very bad recommendation from one past employer, or one negative past online experience or reputation hit?

I don't know, you may well be, but I suspect most companies are not.

Most reasonable people will take the size of a company into consideration when looking at reviews on GlassDoor (at least in the last, looks like it's no longer worth looking at now). So a single bad review for a small company would not be a deal breaker for me. It's the patterns I look for.

Hopefully, you're doing the same when hiring.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#104

Post by glouwbug »

alisonatwork wrote: post #15

My eyes opened to this after leaving my last company. They announced layoffs shortly after I quit and Glassdoor was inundated with a flood of long, detailed reviews expressing concern and unhappiness around all the issues that had caused me to leave voluntarily. The company's star rating dropped from 3.5ish to 3 and was trending down. Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews…

But don't we do the same? When looking for a new job we remove contacts from references who might cause more harm than good. It's all about image

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#105

Post by bryanlarsen »

otoburb wrote: post #63
Dig1t wrote: post #32

This sounds like a market opportunity. If Glassdoor has pivoted to shilling for other corporations, someone should turn around and make a site that allows honest negative reviews of companies. Anyone interested?

I believe Team Blind does this and tries to deflect the gaming through blind anonymous reviews but where Blind validates the poster possesses a company email. The problem is that if it gets too successful then it's easy for companies to classify emails from the Team Blind domain as spam. Having said this, if that happens then that might already be a yellow flag on the part of the employee.

Why should we trust TeamBlind any more than Glassdoor? Right now their monetization strategy seems to be "VC funding to get critical mass, worry about monetization later". Seems like a recipe for betrayal to me.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#106

Post by ballenf »

glouwbug wrote: post #104
alisonatwork wrote: post #15

My eyes opened to this after leaving my last company. They announced layoffs shortly after I quit and Glassdoor was inundated with a flood of long, detailed reviews expressing concern and unhappiness around all the issues that had caused me to leave voluntarily. The company's star rating dropped from 3.5ish to 3 and was trending down. Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews…

But don't we do the same? When looking for a new job we remove contacts from references who might cause more harm than good. It's all about image

We don't claim our resumes are unbiased platforms of user (employer) generated content. So it's a terrible analogy.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#107

Post by at-fates-hands »

everdrive wrote: post #51
alisonatwork wrote: post #15

My eyes opened to this after leaving my last company. They announced layoffs shortly after I quit and Glassdoor was inundated with a flood of long, detailed reviews expressing concern and unhappiness around all the issues that had caused me to leave voluntarily. The company's star rating dropped from 3.5ish to 3 and was trending down. Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews…

Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.

I would also throw Yelp in there now that they're instituting a form of a social credit system by allowing a user to accuse a business of being racist which then flags the account with a message that says:

‘Business Accused of Racist Behavior’

The end result of this is too obvious to require elaboration.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#108

Post by bencollier49 »

seibelj wrote: post #10

Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is. Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope yo…

Surely, at least in some countries (hypothetically, IANAL), at that point the act of removing negative reviews for money means that they themselves have editorial status and, consequentially, negative reviews are a form of libel?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#109

Post by function_seven »

uniqueid wrote: post #96
Zigurd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason why nearly all social media (if you take reviews to be a form of that) sites should know their customers' identities and be able to use that information to screen for astroturfing. Even a small payment and requiring a method of payment would reduce astroturfing, and put review sites on a revenue model that would reduce the temptation to become extortion-as-a-service.

Ideally, one entity should know the user's identity, and the user can choose what information that entity can make public. Most sites don't need to know a user's legal name, though they may need to know that the user doesn't have a duplicate account and, perhaps, some detail, such as, in the case of Glassdoor, their emloyer.

Unfortunately that still chills legitimate negative reviews. If I know my real identity is tied, somehow, to the gripes I posted about my employer, there's a risk of subpoenas unmasking me when that employer decides I've libeled them.

I don't know how to solve this dilemma. Or if it can be solved. Sometimes anonymity is required to get the unvarnished truth, but it also clearly enables sock puppets and astroturfing.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#110

Post by jaclaz »

tartoran wrote: post #40
kaffee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this true? I thought Yelp still did a decent job of moderating reviews.

No, Yelp was extorting a friend's small food business. He had lots of 5 star reviews, but only a handful of bad reviews (supposedly made up) were showing up on the main page. Yelp contacted him at some point and offered to fix the reviews if he signed some kind of contract with them that amounted to around $2000 of monthly advertising on their site. He told them on the phone he couldn't afford that, he was a small bu…

Well, there is the by now classical story of BottoBistro:

https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/

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