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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#131

Post by TeeWEE »

DesiLurker wrote: post #98

I have worked for a large company that told employees to go write 5* positive reviews on GD. I suspect it is a common practice. this just provides GD to turn into a Yelp of sorts that can do the 'reputation management' on the side. Sigh, I have come to believe that its impossible for the profit motive companies to stay neutral in long term, esp if thats their main revenue source. I wonder if there is a publicly funde…

Its ok for companies to ask their employees to leave reviews at glassdoor right?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#132

Post by justin66 »

fogetti wrote: post #127
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…

It seems to me that the bad reviews were published on the site regardless of their offer. So I can't see how is this extortion. Extortion would be along the lines of "we publish some made up bad reviews unless you pay".

> offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#134

Post by polote »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #75
AlexandrB wrote: post #20

Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of interest between their stated purpose and their finances. This is true of Yelp, BBB, and now, I guess, Glassdoor. This is why organizations like this are not a replacement for government enforced labor and consumer rights. Once an organization establishes a strong b…

Except that if you accept money for better ratings the quality of your suggestions goes down and people stop using your service. This is why many such review sites explicitly do not allow you to pay to alter reviews. Their entire revenue engine would crumble. Some will allow you to solicit reviews (Glassdoor), while others even prohibit that (Yelp, Apple App Store) due to it generally being some way of influencing sc…

> people stop using your service.

Well the only competitor they have is Indeed, and Indeed belongs to the Recruit Holdings Group, like Glassdoor ;)

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#135

Post by bencollier49 »

I just visited the site and was met by a banner stating that trust was central to their product, and so they would never remove bad reviews.

To my mind there must be some confusion here. I believe it's highly unlikely that they'd lie so directly. So something else must be going on, even if it happens to be the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. And even that's unlikely. More digging needed, I think.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#136

Post by [deleted] »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #12
sippingjippers wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic bait-and-switch. This essentially happens with every review site after they build up enough brand awareness to pull it off. I guess it happens because from the perspective of the company it makes total sense to try. Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time

> Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time When things are working well, the answer is because honesty is a better policy in the long run . Impartiality, and a reputation for impartiality, is why Which? still exists, at the age of 63. [0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F [1] https://www.which.co.uk/a…

[deleted]

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#137

Post by artemonster »

What about systems with verifiable content? I.e. when a user leaves a review, that user can only append new versions, and the whole edit chain is verifiable - i.e. you can prove that no outside intervention (by a service host) was made. Are there such systems?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#138

Post by fogetti »

justin66 wrote: post #132
fogetti wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the bad reviews were published on the site regardless of their offer. So I can't see how is this extortion. Extortion would be along the lines of "we publish some made up bad reviews unless you pay".

> offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them

Yes. You are right. That is not extortion.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#139

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

To be perfectly honest, I am now more concerned about disclosing the identities of users, who wrote the reviews to the affected companies. I wrote my share of reviews of previous employers. I did try to stay sufficiently vague and still informative, but they do have my actual email allowing for easy identification.

What have I learned?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#140

Post by lhorie »

wslh wrote: post #122
lhorie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take a different stance: the scientific method is all you can trust. Word of mouth is also inherently biased (e.g. someone that works somewhere may paint a rosier picture at a moderate enough company due to in-group dynamics or even mild forms of stockholm syndrome, just as a ex-employee might be overly negative, and it's up to us to identify potential sources of biases in these anecdotes and take them with the app…

Not clear how you will apply a scientific method to a site that can hide, convince, bribe, censor, etc users so the information you gather is incomplete to have a good analysis. More when people have a short focus span and a scientific method is complex.

This is just my personal interpretation, but the way I approach is I create a trustworthiness score for the set of reviews. For example, too many 5 stars without comments and without low stars might earn a low trustworthiness score because the distribution looks unnatural compared to the distribution in similar competitors. Or a set of 6 reviews, no matter their distribution will also receive a low trustworthiness score simply because there's not much to go on. Reviews of a restaurant complaining about a particularly egregious experience earn a low trustworthiness score since it looks like an outlier and there's emotions running wild. Review sets with a decent number of 3 star reviews containing several well-articulated paragraphs tend to earn a high trustworthiness score. Etc.

So, rather than the score being a dimensionless good-or-bad scale, it's a meta analysis of the reviews, judged on multiple dimensions. This means that some companies/restaurants/products simply don't provide enough information for me to form a conclusion despite having a number of reviews that lean towards either "good" or "bad". And that's ok, because the very fact that I've considered so many different dimensions also tells me that there isn't necessarily a single absolute best option.

This, in my mind, seems like a more accurate depiction of reality than blindly ranking by number of 5 star reviews.

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