A particularly negative review of a London startup[0] by a former employee has been doing the rounds on social media recently. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of extremely positive reviews by current employees have suddenly cropped up for that company as well. So positive they feel a bit like HR plants. But then again, the original feels like a gleeful hatchet-job and is maybe a bit extreme going the other way.<p>Is Glassdoor reliable, and if not, are there any reliable alternatives?<p>[0] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Employee-Review-ROLI-RVW17219691.htm
In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable! When I have left a place happy, I usually forget to write a good review. When I leave a place that was a nightmare to work at, I don't forget to spill the beans to warn people away.<p>It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the company will hire a firm to write them positive reviews and disparage those who have left bad reviews, and not realise that prospective employees can completely tell the difference between the level of detail in the negative reviews 'eg, there was a pm who used to try to physically intimidate the female members of the team by leaning over them when he talked, I saw this on a weekly basis for 6 months until he was promoted to the programme manager and stopped working in our office', and the BS positive ones like 'it's a challenging place to work, the people posting negative reviews are used to workplaces where they need less initiative blah blah blah.<p>You'll see what I mean as you read them.<p>Sites like glassdoor are the only safety net we have to protect ourselves from those kinds of situations.
I don't really trust any Glassdoor reviews. I've always figured many positive reviews are fake, and the problem with negative reviews is that they're often written by disgruntled employees who are unable to reliably assess their own contributions to problematic situations.<p>The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by employees who were fired for basically being awful, hostile, aggressive people who fought with everyone and refused to do work. These are the folks who are technically competent and think that gives them a pass for generally being an awful human being to work with. Being willing to fire people like this has resulted in this company having the happiest and most productive culture I've ever personally worked in, but it does lead to some pretty harsh reviews on Glassdoor. You're not going to get any of this context from the reviews.<p>The most informative reviews are the negative ones written by folks who left voluntarily and were not fired. In fact, these reviews, if they exist, can be a gold mine of valuable information. But it can sometimes be hard to pick these out, as folks who were fired sometimes lie about it and make it seem as if they chose to leave.<p>A generic tip when reading negative reviews is to look for specific details and concrete examples. The more details -- and the more specific they are -- the more likely the review is to have some basis in fact. This tip alone can filter out a lot of noise in both positive and negative reviews.<p>If you ever want to <i>write</i> a negative review, the corollary is that you should include specific, concrete examples to convince the reader that you're not just disgruntled. Avoid emotional language.<p>A negative review written with a calm, collected tone is also a sign that there might be something there.<p>It's also worth looking for themes that seem to be consistent across multiple negative reviews. As with Amazon reviews, it's often best to look at distributional properties of Glassdoor reviews rather than focus on specific reviews too much.
I've looked at a few companies only, and from what I've seen, in my limited experience, is that the only people motivated to leave reviews were those who were fired/layedoff/let go. So we're left with 100% negative reviews. These are not tech companies, so no one working there has any idea that glassdoor even exists. The place I work now has TERRIBLE reviews, and it's pretty obvious who left the reviews, and it's obvious to me why they left those reviews, but it does not reflect the reality of working here at all.<p>I guess I should go leave a positive review, but the motivation of an angry/hurt person is WAY higher than those of us who are happy.
Negative reviews seem to be pretty reliable, you have to have a motivation to post them, even if the content may not be objectively accurate. I worked for a company with terrible management and every time an employee would leave they would leave a negative review.<p>However, glassdoor is not completely objective-- companies can get negative reviews removed simply by complaining about them, and the quality control on this is not good. So that means that over time the HR department can just keep making accounts and complaining about the negative reviews and they disappear.<p>Thus if you leave a negative review you have to be a watchdog... and if it gets removed, even without cause, glassdoor won't let you leave another one.<p>However they can't hold back the tide, here's a comment from a recent review (redacted for privacy):
" Forced "culture". It's explicitly stated that culture fit is a huge part of this backwards company. If you are too tired to go to a happy hour when the XXXX crew comes to town prepare for awkward questions why and being told you're not supporting the culture if you don't attend - by the CTO."<p>Reading the reviews of this company (that I worked at and know first hand) I see a lot of negative recent reviews, but the overall score is 2.4... way too high to be accurate.<p>HR is still grooming the reviews and leaving fake positives, to keep that overall rating up, and the negatives are all relatively recent (though they describe problems that have existed for 5 years.)
I wouldn't take everything on Glassdoor at face value, but if there are recurring negative themes in the reviews then that can be a red flag. I read them the same way I read reviews on Amazon, I look at the distribution of scores and then read a handful of each rating.<p>If there is a low distribution of 1 star ratings, then either the 1 star people are outliers or there is some sort of incentive for the higher ratings (either pressure from management to give positive reviews, or the company could just pay for fake reviews). Sometimes this is obvious, like a bunch of positive reviews that sound the same posted in a short timeframe, and sometimes it isn't. At the end of the day it is going to be a gut feeling.
This is not a direct answer to the question of GlassDoor reliability, but I have found negative GlassDoor reviews something interesting to bring up in interviews.<p>For example, I interviewed at a company that had a fair amount of negative reviews on GlassDoor, as well as some positive ones that came across (in my opinion) as astro-turfing. I brought this up with the guy doing my interview, and it lead to an interesting discussion about the internal dynamics of the company and what the real pros and cons are. His answer was basically that Division X had some real issues but they were working on it, but this position was going to be in Division Y which functioned in a different way. I ultimately decided against this offer for different reasons, but I appreciated the candor of the interviewer when I brought it up.<p>The usefulness of GlassDoor probably decreases as the company gets larger. I doubt the reviews of, say, Google or IBM have any bearing on reality because they're so massive and the experience inside the company is certainly not universal. Likewise, it's probably not that accurate for tiny companies.<p>I'll close with a (guarded) anecdote. I happened to know from insiders that a particular startup (~100 employees) was very dysfunctional and the leadership had severe issues. The GlassDoor reviews had detailed scathing review after detailed scathing review for a little while, then switched to entirely things along the lines of "[ThisCompany] is great! It's sooo great! And I love the leadership, especially [CTO who is a known jerk and known to be driving the company into the ground]. He/She is tough but fair and sooo smart!" So, take that anecdote for what it's worth.
Yeah this is a very tricky thing to do well as it will always be abused. Glassdoor has been struggling (they've raised a bunch of flat rounds) and there are so many cases i've seen of bad reviews, followed by HR getting wind of it and burying them in a ton of fake positive reviews.<p>I run a site called TransparentCareer (<a href="https://www.transparentcareer.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.transparentcareer.com</a>) and we've tried to make all of this data quantitative and verify that the person actually worked at the organization and what role they were in. We are getting ready to release a qualitative type review/question answering system using the same verification method and you will be able to see what department within the company the review is in reference to.<p>I would love to hear how people think this could be done better as we are currently developing the product and would love if it could solve this need in the best way possible. Is employee verification the biggest problem or is it something else?
It can be a red flag, but it is often not 100% of the truth.<p>The larger the company gets, the less useful glassdoor is. The same company could have very awful very political teams, and very awesome and great teams.<p>More useful.. go out to the bar with your future team. If you didn't enjoy it, then pass. If you enjoyed it, then think about working there.
Glassdoor is an interesting data point, but not "reliable" as a standalone rating system for multiple reasons:<p>1. It tends to attract complaints and unhappy (ex) employees more than anything else. The ratings tend to skew low as a result. Look for common themes, and take them with a grain of salt.<p>2. Complaints can be specific to a department or role. Complaints about Amazon, e.g., may be related to working in one of their distribution centers, not in HQ/IT.<p>3. Current employees don't tend to leave reviews. Unlike an annual employee survey—which would be a better indicator if companies chose to publish them—Glassdoor tends to ignore current employees.
Every now I'll be contacted by a recruiter and look up their company on glassdoor and see like a flood of 1 star reviews on it (both from applicants and employees)... like you can tell that there was a mass exodus of employees and that it's falling apart, so they're trying to rehire for those spots. You inevitably also see a ton of recent five star reviews that say something like:<p>"Wow I don't understand these five star reviews, I'm totally a real person who works here! Positives: <everything is amazing>; Negatives: <something inconsequential>"<p>Anyways, that's when you politely decline to interview.
Positive reviews can sometimes be just as valuable as negative reviews.<p>For example: I came across a company with many glowing 5-star reviews, and one of those reviews was from a software developer who very matter-of-factly stated that it was not a place for people who take issue with working overtime on a regular basis, as if doing so was somehow a point of pride within that company's culture.<p>Yeah, no thanks.
Personally, I've worked at companies far worse than described in this letter, and if you think places like this don't exist you're young or foolish, or both. I've seen real emotional, and psychological violence at companies treated as everyday business. As an employee I was threatened for almost any reason whereas managers sexual/racial harassment, rape, yes rape, were dismissed as "he's just like that."
A few years ago I was at a failing company. The quick influx of detailed negative reviews (from people who were both still there and who had recently left) was perhaps the only public indicator that things were going poorly. I felt so terrible for all the people who were joining based on rosy promises while glassdoor reviews laid it <i>all</i> out.<p>So yeah, in many cases glassdoor is a strong signal. Don't just look at the average rating, read the reviews from the past few months and look for trends and red flags.
>Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of extremely positive reviews by current employees have suddenly cropped up for that company as well. So positive they feel a bit like HR plants.<p>Most of the responses here are spot on but I want to address that one specific point. It's highly unlikely those new reviews are HR plants. Instead, the company is clearly aware of the negative review and the fact that it's getting publicity and has asked/encouraged their current staff to post their own reviews.
Looking at Glassdoor for every company I have ever worked at: it's a mixed bag. There are truthful reviews and then there are the really unhappy individuals who can be overdramatic. Unhappy folks are usually not reviewing the company from an impartial position and the stories can be misleading.<p>For instance: looking at a recent review of my company from a few days ago, it saddens me to read something written so well that is so inaccurate. The content opines that people of color would not be welcome at our organization. I cannot tell you how completely FAR off that is from the truth. Diversity is something we value tremendously. That being said, we are a tech company in the agricultural space that is located in the midwest. The fact of the matter is: our pool of candidates is simply <i>not that diverse</i> to begin with.<p>Because we are a small startup focusing on survival, we hire the right person for the job, regardless of their background! Ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc... is never part of the decision! When this sentiment was shared with the organization, the reviewer interpreted it as "we do not care about diversity and people of color". Not making a specific point to hire diverse folks is NOT the same as not appreciating a diverse team!<p>Now this is almost a self fulfilling prophecy: a person of color might read that post and be completely turned off from even giving our company a shot. It hurts to imagine this scenario.<p>Long story short: the unhappy folks are usually the loudest and so I think you'll tend to get the 'jade colored' glasses.<p>Another anecdote: my fiancee was warned by a friend who previously worked at a company she was interviewing at. This person warned her that her manager was mean and grumpy and she'd be unhappy there. My fiancee has been there for months now without any problems whatsoever, and this manager tends to confide in her more than others on the team.<p>So I think you need to use every available resource you can to gather data points that can feed into your decision... but a lot of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
I take Glassdoor reviews in the same way I take Yelp Reviews. If there are 9 positive reviews, and a single negative review, that's probably not a problem. If it's 50/50 and the majority of the positive reviews seem like slightly changed variants on the same review, then I'm very suspicious.
I worked for about six months at one of the worst places of my 28-year software engineering career. I left a negative review on Glassdoor when I left, but Glassdoor removed the review after the company's HR department hit them with a mountain of whinging.<p>I also interviewed with a well-known company two weeks ago and they told me, during the interview, that they've had to have Glassdoor remove comments about their idiotic interview quizzes. I still look at Glassdoor, but I don't take it as seriously as I do reviews on Amazon or Yelp.
Glassdoor reviews are useful only if you manually read them individually and critically judge each one for what it's worth.<p>A lot of negative reviews for my current employer are incredibly spot-on.<p>I had a very negative experience with my former employer, which currently has 11 reviews with a 4.9 star average, which led them to be rated the #10 best employer in a very large tech market.<p>They were constantly explicitly threatened to fire people. Ran off 2 out of their 3 founders, some of them very abruptly, jeopardizing the staff's pay and benefits (and this was just a couple of months before winning that "best in town" award). They either cynically produced horrible quality code for their clients, or farmed you out as a body shop to local software teams that couldn't attract their own talent directly, and for good reason.<p>Exactly 1 year later I now recognize exactly 1/3 of the bio/profiles listed on their website, the other 2/3 being totally unrecognized and new.<p>When I left the place I had a negative sick time balance, which they offered to write off, and also kept my health care running for an extra month after the month that I departed. And during the same conversation they offered that "we should not talk bad about each other," and of course they had the one really nice guy have this conversation with me.<p>So now, I look for individual negative reviews which seem reasonably articulate and unemotional, and if a place looks interesting enough, try to queue these issues up for questions during a prospective interview.
Companies definitely try to inflate their rankings with fake or forced reviews. But these are usually pretty easy to spot. They are often short vague 5-star reviews.<p>Read longer reviews and judge for yourself. Don’t trust the star ratings.
In my experience, the data points most accurate in Glassdoor are those related to tone from the top and the CEO or owner. I've not seen one that didn't match my experience either as an employee or as a customer.<p>But it's important to remember that these are static data points in time, so there are certainly factors you should weigh based on other available data. For public companies, it can be important to assess changes in organization structure including and around the CEO. For private companies, sale of company is worth considering, though that top leader may still be in place post-sale.<p>Depending on the role you intend to enter, a negative tone may be what you're looking for -- lots of managers enter roles to help turn around a company. That the problems have been called out directly provides an important starting point in understanding whether you will actually be in a position to fix the problem. And public disclosure of the problems also provides a clear target for response through subsequent Marketing/PR and corporate improvements.
This prompted me to log in and check out reviews for the company where I work.<p>Some observations:<p>- Reviews are more or less accurate, but in the context that it's a big company and most of the reviews apply to their immediate team<p>- Most reviews don't seem to be aware that they are actually reviewing their team/their manager/their org<p>- Viewed with that lense/context, reviews are accurate but not representative of the company as a whole<p>All in all, if you look at the reviews holistically, they paint a good enough picture. Most reviews for the company in this case were positive, a few bad teams, but for the most part the company at least makes an effort to provide a good environment for employees. After reading enough reviews, that theme did come across and I would agree with it<p>I imagine the site is great for assessing the area you're going into, but only really paints a good picture of the entire organization when the company is pretty small.
I wouldn't trust one bad review. There are a lot of "haters" out there that like to unfairly review some companies.<p>I would trust the ensemble and the overall tone of reviews
No. Somehow, someone wrote a review for my company that has never had any employees other than myself. Unless I have multiple personalities, then it was me.
The companies with the best glassdoor reviews are most likely the companies that know how to "hack" the system. For instance, a former consulting company I worked for made leaving a "glassdoor review" semi mandantory as part of the onboarding process. So right after you onboard with all the rah rah rah about "unique culture" and "fun environment" you tend to leave a review to that effect. This particular company tended to have a 5:1 ratio of "this place is awesome" to "This place is awful" comments. I also think that if you see a lot of responses from the CEO for negative reviews that lean toward defensive then you need to view that as a red flag. I personally would see GD as one of several indicators not a final word on where to work. If you can spot a trend such as "So much unpaid overtime" or similar negative post, you can probably trust it as being at least semi accurate. However, one persons great company is anothers personal hell, so you need to decide if the place is a fit for YOU.<p>That said, I am a big fan of ROLIs products, and the JUCE framework is a great audio/plugin framework used by tons of companies in that arena. Seeing the 2/3 reviews makes me sorta sad, but I can see how they would have to be a lean, long hour hard work wearing many hats kinda place. Building semi pricey gear for musicians is a hard sell, as musicians are usually a lower income segment of the population...
I wouldn't take Glassdoor reviews as absolute truth but when I read the reviews for my current company they generally are pretty accurate at giving you a general sense of the place.
Every single online review platform can be gamed by just soliciting reviews from people who have just had a positive experience and shunting people who have just had a negative experience to some kind of alternative channel where their complaints can be hidden from the public and/or resolved.<p>The more aggressive the company is in managing public perception through online review platforms, the more challenging it will be for anything negative to get out there.<p>Companies have a strong incentive to systematically manipulate online review systems. The people leaving the reviews 'organically' just have some intrinsic motivation to write them. Over time the shills will win no matter what kind of rules you set up to prevent it. To some extent also the capacity to run a good shill program is a signal of the health of the business doing the shilling, so it doesn't completely destroy the value of them.<p>The main way to counteract this kind of shilling is for objective and trusted third parties to compare companies, products, etc. with tests that cannot be faked and perhaps combined with some subjective evaluation. If the user is not paying to maintain the accuracy and objectivity of the reviews that they're using to inform their decision, then why should they expect it to be anything other than some combination of shill-spam, the odd lunatic, and the increasingly rare fair-minded and well-informed reviewer? The aggregate of all those things is not necessarily the ideal wisdom-of-crowds outcome because all of the inputs can be defrauded or otherwise manipulated in various directions.
You can generally recognize a few broad themes pretty reliably. How strictly or loosely things are structured, the power distance between management and employees, etc. There are sometimes things too weird to make up that come through (One I saw had a bunch of reviews like "great place except there are too many dogs", "didn't get a promotion, hated it, tons of dogs", "great benefits, love dogs in the office", "woof, terrible job")
I look at trends by job titles and I look for consistent incidental remarks, not negativeness or positiveness.<p>Example of the first: when evaluating one employer there were many negative reviews, but mostly from a particular high-churn part of the company; the experience of easy-come easy-go customer-facing support may not tell you much about the experience of someone even one level removed from that position. The odd positive review was usually a higher-level tech, and even if they had a negative outlook on the company or its future, such reviews would still add "but don't listen to <i>these</i> guys--they just couldn't hack it."<p>Example of the second, same company: it's very easy to get hired by this company but training is limited and you could just as easily get fired for poor performance -- i.e., the company's hiring requirements were significantly less than their actual on-the-job skill requirements.<p>So I applied to this company based on mostly negative reviews. I was aiming for a higher position, and I was confident in my ability while having very little evidence of it: if their hiring requirements had actually matched the job I got, I would never have gotten it.
Yes, I think they are very reliable. I worked for a London Startup that currently has 100% negative reviews and I regret not looking at them before I joined.<p>From what I've seen, a lot of good or decent places tend to have a general positive rating, and the really bad ones are going to have multiple negative reviews.<p>Take individual reviews with a grain of salt, but as a group I think it's fairly accurate.
When I've looked at the reviews of places I've worked, I've found them to be reasonable, but often painting an incomplete picture. Most of them seem to be from people who never really understood the work or the culture of the place, and therefore didn't perform well.<p>Also, it will bias towards bad reviews. I've never posted a review of a place I loved working at (and therefore never posted a review). I guess I should, but it would probably just be assumed to be astroturfing.<p>One other issue is when there are multiple classes of workers. For example Netflix has a lot of negative reviews from the folks who work in the DVD warehouses. But their work environment has nothing to do with the software engineering part of the company, which is the majority of the company, so it skews negative. Amazon has a similar problem, where a lot of the reviews come from the warehouse workers, who, for better or worse, get treated differently.
This is a textbook case of something every first-year statistics student studies: voluntary response bias.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_bias" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_bias</a><p>If I remember, things like these tend to draw out extremes, but the missing middle tends to be more moderate.
IMO, finding a job you like is so much about finding a place where you'll be able to tolerate the bad sides. Negative reviews are the best places to find that.<p>It's a fact of life that there are no perfect jobs, and the difference between happiness and soul crushing is often about how you can deal with the negative sides of your job.
Any anonymous system is open to abuse, or at the very least to distortion of the truth. People who didn't like a company who left can say whatever they like and are free to stretch the truth, and likewise companies can write their own exaggeratedly positive reviews.<p>If you want to know what a company is like... go look for yourself?
Negative reviews can be removed from Glassdoor if the company works hard enough. I know of a local employer who has tons of terrible feedback on Glassdoor and devoted someone full time for several weeks to comb through the reviews and get the most inflammatory removed.<p>I would take Glassdoor with a few grains of salt.
No. I know of companies who have management post good reviews to minimize the impact of a real negative reviews. One bad review from a real former employee? Post five good reviews!<p>Also, I've seen evidence of one employee posting multiple bad reviews. It's a bad system all around.
> are there any reliable alternatives?<p>The Old School method was to ask around, find actual company insiders or former employees.<p>These days it's relatively easy to find these individuals via a quick sort on Linkedin. Simply, reach out and talk to these people direct.
Negative reviews are accurate I believe. Obviously you have to take them with a grain of salt but the positive ones seem to generally be written either by HR or through exhortation of the employee base to paint the company in a great light.
My employer is consistently ranked as one of Glassdoor's 'Best Places to Work', and also regularly encourages staff to write reviews on the site (though without any actual or implicit incentivizing, as far as I know). Make of that what you will.<p>In my view, encouraging staff to speak honestly of their positive experiences with the company is a reasonable objective from a PR perspective (this is really a PR issue, not HR). Coercing such feedback of course would be unethical, but I think it's awfully presumptuous to assume any company was doing such just because some good reviews showed up with auspicious timing.
Just my 2c, I tend to give more weight to longer reviews unless they get rambling or show some other obvious personal distortion. I also totally discount short ones at either end of rating spectrum, for reasons.
A with most systems like CSATs and NPS Glassdoor ratings reflect the extremes, those who have an axe to grind and those with an investment to protect the brand of the company reviewed. Could be competing company shills, disgruntled employees, those with emotional investments related their self-worth and such. The truth always lie somewhere in between. The best thing to do is to talk to employees and use your gut in the interview process or during your decision to support the company as a customer as you interact with people there.
Reliable, no. Useful, yes, but mainly in the aggregate.<p>If there are only a few reviews for a company and those reviews are all over the map, I'm not going to put a lot of stock in any of them.<p>However, if there are a dozen or more reviews, most of which come across as fair and nuanced regardless of the score they assign, then I feel comfortable drawing some hypotheses based on the points they raise.<p>Also, companies can respond to reviews on Glassdoor. In more than one case the content of the (defensive) response has been more valuable to me than the original review.
I left both good and bad reviews for bad employers but I do think negative reviews are usually more reliable since employees who hate a company are more likely to be bothered to write a review.
Absolutely. I once made the mistake of ignoring a Glassdoor review and it caused me no end of trouble. What a stinker of a company. The reviews were completely accurate.
I generally will give a firm the benefit of the doubt and discount 1 or 2 bad reviews. When there is a consistent negative theme in the reviews then I trust it completely. I have turned down several interviews because of Glassdoor reviews and have bought up bad reviews during interviews. Everytime the HR person has confirmed that the reviews had truth to them and that they were working on the issue or it was already fixed.
No. They tend to skew negative, in my experience.<p>I once got a bad review because I had the audacity to quiz a candidate that said they'd done work with databases before about SQL. We're talking 'what's the difference between INNER and OUTER JOIN' level of questions. They were interviewing for a position where they'd be expected to write plenty of SQL. At that moment I completely discounted Glassdoor.
Culture is often local, not global (to a company). A single team may have a great culture, and the team sitting right next to them might be horrible.<p>Culture is also completely different from direction. Some place may have a great culture but a lack of direction, or vice versa.<p>I would say you should really see if there are reviews from all departments and if the number of reviews correlates to number of employees to paint a realistic picture.
A lot of people talk about how only upset employees leave a review, but the opposite side f the spectrum also leaves reviews. Really happy employees also write reviews. Distribution goes to the 5* and 1*
For example, my current company has 100% 5* reviews on glassdoor.
I guess part of what incentives us to leave reviews is that we are hiring like crazy, and want smart/good people to work with us.
In years past, I had written two reviews for employers on Glassdoor.<p>One was positive, and it remains.<p>The negative review was removed.<p>I don't bother writing any reviews or using Glassdoor anymore.
Glassdoor has been reliable in most cases in my experience. Watch out for the warning bells and patterns negative/positive within the reviews, as they are most likely true about that company. There are also companies that have HR fake review their company, these reviews become pretty apparent as other people will call them out on it.
Glassdoor has a huge conflict of interest. Its customers are the companies themselves.<p>And it is not just a review problem. Even for job interview questions, where I work we were unhappy that someone wrote a detailed and correct answer to a question we usually ask. HR emailed glassdoor and they removed the answer saying it didn't comply with ToS.
You have to read them with a strong grain of salt and make your own judgment. Most people don't like their jobs and aren't capable of writing a fair and balanced review. But sometimes enough obvious red flags pop up, or too much astroturfing, that can be reliable indicators.
Glassdoor is moderately reliable. Not sure of better alternatives - that would be great.<p>HR often plants or strongly encourages employees directly or through managers to post How Great Things Are Here. Negative reviews can go away mysteriously, are buried. It's disconcerting. A lot like Yelp.
Like any review site the reviews will always be either super positive or super negative, and with Glassdoor I think this natural effect is heightened because employment can be very emotional for people (versus a review of a burger on Yelp, for example).
Having left a horrible company in the past and later decided to write a negative review, I can tell you that my experience has definitely been that Glassdoor is an awful indicator of a company, unless you're extremely picky about the metrics.
My company changed a lot of stuff and as a result had a turnaround from high engagement and low turnover to the opposite within the last year. But lots of positive reviews still up there reflecting a company that doesn't exist anymore.
For my employer I'd say they are <i>if</i> you manage to link the reviews to the particular organizational unit as the culture and life of these can vary wildly. Unfortunately an outsider is unlikely to be able to do this.
Generally accurate though it's possible for one person to generate a lot of noise, and companies can talk a Glassdoor into removing reviews. (Generally on the basis of it pinpointing one individual)
I do think reviews are reliable source of current situation of a company, I trust negatives ones more than the positives. Its not just for glassdoor but for any reviews that you see on yelp,google or fb. I sift through the negative reviews and try to find a common factor in the reviews, that would be a way to validate the review.<p>I trust negative reviews more because if I had a good experience, I don't have any incentive at all to login to a webpage, create credentials if its needed and then go through the myriad of steps to post a positive review. But on the other hand, if I had a bad experience, the only way to vent it out is by giving them a bad review. I am willing to go through the hoops of signups and surveys so that I post that one bad review about the service. There is an incentive for me there.<p>Tailpiece: There are many services that you can purchase to write positive reviews for your company/service. The trend to identify this is that whenever there is a negative review, it gets buried by a bunch of near 5 star positive reviews, mostly with a one liner review text.