211–220 of 342 posts
Luckily, it's pretty easy to spot fake reviews on Glassdoor. Unfortunately though, it kind of ruins the experience for most people. The two big mobile app stores have been flooded with spam reviews for over 5 years now unchecked. For those that know how to spot fake reviews, it's easy to tell which apps are not legit. For most consumers though, they just believe what they see.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blockchain! Proving that reviews haven't been removed might actually make this a real application for a blockchain.
Problem is, you will be forced by courts to remove some reviews for the usual reasons, making you instantly untrustworthy
You can force a public facing site to stop displaying it, but if it's decentralized it is still there.
The disadvantage being of course there is no way to remove fake/scam reviews.
If you want your company to have a positive rating, you'd better pay them. Sad to see Glassdoor move to this business model, but hey, it works.
Goodhart's law in action. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Nothing more, nothing less
The argument for all of these metrics and push for competition is that it pushes out the lazy and leeches of society. What it really does is draws out the clever and lazy or clever leeches of society who are proficient at gaming systems and metrics, all while making plenty of proficient and productive peoples' lives more difficult and miserable.
It also incentivizes everyone to focus more on manipulating systems and target metrics than doing what they're supposed to do. Metrics rule my life so why bother doing anything that doesn't focus on the metrics? Real successes outside the metrics go unrewarded.
When failure is acceptable, metrics often don't become targets they become guidelines to help you achieve success. When I go to the gym, lifting a certain weight and performing a certain number of repetitions can be use to quantify success and improvement. I can cheat and lie to myself: perform a repetition incorrectly that makes it easier or add support and so forth. Ultimately though, gaming these metrics I know I'm only cheating myself. I may not see improvements and it may be discouraging but I know with perseverance, I have a strong chance of improvement. It works because I have no ulterior motivation that makes me want or need to game the metrics and am willing to accept my failures and success alike.
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.
Three things actually occur here.
1. Companies pay the employee who left the review if they can identify them. $1,000 to the former employee to take the review down, along with an NDA.
2. Companies push Glassdoor to validate the reviewer was actually employed by the company. Some reviewers may not respond to Glassdoor’s confirmation requests, resulting in the review being taken down.
3. Companies’ HR or Talent Acquisition employees write reviews themselves and promote internally to other happy employees that adding “honest reviews” will help accelerate the company. Basically indirectly fishing for 5 star reviews.
Any startup with more than ~300 total employees (current + former) generally has attention to their Glassdoor ratings. A local company I know of is a huge offender to removing negative reviews and flooding their page with 4.5/5 star reviews in quick succession.
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…
In 2016, I wrote a scathing, negative Glassdoor review about a company that truly was a developer sweatshop. It had only 1 review at the time. The review got close to 50 upvotes and was one of the top Google search results for the company name. A second negative review came up not too long after that. Within weeks, the company had at least 20 5 star reviews added to this. The entirety of the company was no more than…
I've seen the exact same thing as a small-mediumish (100-200 now) start-up I used to work for, there'd be an email sent around to encourage employees to leave a good review, seeing as you can't change your review after it's a scary way to waste your shot. But I guess that shots wasted anyways if the system is rigged to begin with.
Just checked the company again, and my review has since been removed (but some other 1 star reviews are still there).
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…
I believe you are correct that Glassdoor wont explicitly take “cash” to remove a bad review. However they do have internal costs if you threaten them legally, which can compel a removal.
I detailed more of the practices in another comment further down; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383
I used to use Glass door extensively to vet potential employers. After starting at one company however I realized the problem with this. Regularly in meetings the head of HR (which they called "People") would encourage us to go leave 5 star reviews on Glass door to help with recruiting efforts. It was really spun as a way to help the company. The problem though is that this company had some problems, things I would n…
I researched this a lot because I noticed companies I had intimate knowledge of had any sub-4 star review disappear. I detailed the practices in another comment elsewhere; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383