I used to work at Desktop Metal which was (at the time) a pretty small startup here in Boston.<p>When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment.<p>At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company.<p>The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when I contacted Glassdoor they said there was no issue.<p>A week later my own review was removed for a generic content policy violation.<p>Goes without saying I don't trust Glassdoor for much.
I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic.<p>And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading.<p>Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the salary column it will show a number which is designed to suggest a number of salary data elements available. Honestly I cannot say what that number actually means as it seems to have no value at all. Specifically, it will say 5 or 8 or some other small but non-zero number... and yet there are zero visible salary records for the company (even if you are a contributor of information and thus deemed to be allowed to view other information on the site).<p>I expect Glassdoor is like the many dating sites on the internet - full of fluff and false/artificial information so the site appears to be valuable and worth visits.<p>If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.
I remember working at a company that got frequently mentioned as “one of the best places to work in CITY”, and a few months into my tenure one of the HR employees circulated the website to go vote for our company on the “best places to work in CITY” website.<p>I think Glassdoor is basically grievances by employees, some of whom are unreasonable, and fake counter-reviews by HR/marketing. I generally just look at the complaints and gauge how unrealistic they sound.
The Yelp of employment sites.<p>Glassdoor generates revenue through advertising and 'employer branding solutions'. Companies looking to advertise their job listings and showcase their reputation are charged for these services.<p>Reviews in general have grown unreliable as incentive alignments have shifted.
I once worked at a company that started getting a slew of bad Glassdoor reviews. The reviews were real; the company leadership had been making some bad choices and the reviews reflected it. So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews.
And then there are the fake reviews left by shady reputation management services. $previous_company (which was very small) had many negative reviews pop up in a short time frame, which at first was thought to be a disgruntled employee making multiple accounts, but then a reputation management service "came to the rescue" just at the right time and offered to get them removed. IIRC, Glassdoor did actually remove these eventually after being contacted, but whoever offered to get them removed was told to fuck off.
Glassdoor is a hellscape for employees and employers. Current and former employees can write literally anything they want, true or false, and it gets published. Employers have no cause for recourse except apparently paying people to write fake reviews. So a brand can be damaged by fake reviews or lies in reviews, and have to go through backchannels to fix it. It's basically a place for legal libel and puts everyone in a worse spot. I never trust Glassdoor.
I left a review on the BBB, when I was a student, after being promised a gift card for a video interview of a product for one of the large tech companie's PMs.<p>I refused a free trial or some other token offer by a call center employee that the company sent as part of the BBB resolution process.<p>Not long after,the BBB removed my review even though I offered email evidence between the PM and I. I emailed one of their managers asking for an explanation for why they removed it. They gave me some vague boilerplate that didn't address the issue.<p>Because they weren't clear in their communication with me on the reasons why, I couldn't help but wonder whether they had some similar incentive in their relationships with certain companies to remove problematic reviews.
I have operated a organigram app for the past 5 years. One of the bigger user segments is these so called ORM agencies. They use the app to keep track of their large "teams", assign tasks, etc. A team can be as large as 12,000 members<p>At first I didn't know what to think. Then I learned that their teams are mostly made up of illiterate people who need a few bucks to survive. I don't blame them. Online reviews are useless, if you need to know something ask someone you know, don't just take the opinion of someone on the griftnet
He mentions ChatGPT in passing but you could write a whole separate article about that. These bogus review companies are going to be able to pump out so many more reviews, of higher quality, with access to LLM-generated content. This problem is only going to get even worse.
To me the entire idea of Glassdoor is fundamentally flawed so there is a part of me that can't exactly blame for things like this going on.<p>It has been shown time and time again that most people won't go out of their way to leave a positive review for something and will only make the effort when they want to complain.<p>Mix this with something like a job where generally the only reason people will leave is likely due to something negative going on (while I don't have numbers to back this up, I would not think that most are leaving because they are simply not learning anything new and feel like they are done where they currently are. But maybe I am wrong about this assumption?).<p>So the people leaving would only have negative views that strongly skew the actual appearance of how a job may be.<p>I have left 3 Glassdoor reviews (once for an interview that was so bad I walked out) and all of them negative. But for 2 of them if I look back honestly I realize that much of what I was leaving for was not an issue for the entire company and was more specific to my team.<p>That doesn't mean that those negative reviews are not valuable, they are. But I don't think they really paint a good picture, I know I don't trust it if I am looking at a company knowing both what I mentioned and what is mentioned in this article.
Hmm that ChatGPT review doesn't sound like it was written by a real human either. Because it's in corporatese not English.<p>And back to Glassdoor, they seem to be desperate for reviews? Maybe non fake? I wanted to check a company last month so I went to them and found out you now have to register. Alright, I made the effort. Then they didn't let me see anything before I uploaded a review of my current job.<p>I don't know if this is to prevent fakes but they lost me, at least for now.
I'm old enough to remember when "the wisdom of the crowd" on collaborative web sites was going to solve all our problems, but every platform that could have delivered on such a promise has sold their soul to make an extra buck from people gaming their systems, and killed the golden goose in the process. The <i>only</i> reviews I trust are on Steam, and even then, I take them with a grain of salt.
Glassdoor's model suffers from intrinsic problems such that... it's hard to imagine a site as it could ever work well for a sustained period of time before becoming a target for abuse.<p>It also seems inevitable that such sites, will exist. Can you really blame Glassdoor here? Are they supposed to do a thorough investigation for every review? At least it gives some sort of weak signal about the place.
The society as a whole would benefit from more information transparency (in the job market and several other areas) but the economic incentives just don't align to make this happen.<p>Which is kinda funny because the free market itself is advertised based on how great it is - when there's information transparency.
Isn't it fairly widely known that the overall Glassdoor rating isn't worth looking at, and that short and wildly positive (or short and negative) individual reviews aren't useful either, because of the widespread fake review problem. Usually the ones clearly written by humans with real knowledge of the company are a little longer and contain particular story snippet that will add to the credibility. In my experience those skew toward the negative however, as I would mentally discard short positive reviews more frequently even if genuine, being so hard to distinguish from paid or incentivised corporate hr-wash.
Has anyone here on HN actually "ordered" such fake reviews?<p>Or were maybe involved in their creation.<p>I kinda get it... The pressure for a perfect 5 stars is immensive when every single competitor has it.
Despite high turnover, and lots of complaints, my last company had one of the highest Glassdoor ratings I'd ever seen> How? Simple, they'd pay their employees to do so.
In my last role, I built an education reviews site at scale — challenge is remaining objective given that your audience are actively airing the dirty laundry of your paying customers. Commercially it didn’t stack up, so we had to monetise the traffic through display ads.<p>Same case with Glassdoor — dissing paying customers through your audience is never good for business.
If you want an example of fake positive reviews, look at a former employer of mine trying to cover up their toxicity, weirdos…<p><a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CaseGuard-Reviews-E7449339.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CaseGuard-Reviews-E7449339...</a><p>Their Google reviews are even stranger
> <i>And I’d say that the above answer [from chatgpt] was better than 95% of the fake reviews I came across.</i><p>Perhaps this is because the easily identifiable fake reviews are poorly written? The real question is how many fake reviews are good enough to avoid detection?
I was too afraid to leave an accurate/bad review of my previous employer because the CEO was petty and litigious. I don't trust glassdoor to keep me anonymous.
Plus I already knew that HR was producing good reviews to drown out the bad ones.
Seems like Blind should get in on this game, since the premise of the app is that it requires a company email address. Use an LLM to extract insights from the comments and give them to prospective job hunters for a small fee, or even just run ads.
We had a nasty review from one ex employee and in Germany it was easy to find a cheap lawyer/agency who wrote a letter to glassdoor demanding removal and a few days later the negative review was gone.
How are there no watchdog groups who can be the intermediary and rule against companies playing dirty with reviews, short of filing a lawsuit and using a judge? Like a BBB with teeth.<p>Trustpilot seems to game reviews too.
About the IP addresses:<p>If the users are behind CGNAT you cannot rely on the IP address.<p>I don't know what Glassdoor does in that case though.