Comment by Mitchhhs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mitchhhs | Hacker News Reader

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.

I run a site called TransparentCareer (https://www.transparentcareer.com) 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.

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?

> followed by HR getting wind of it and burying them in a ton of fake positive reviews.

Or even worse, from https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Lab49-Reviews-E257101.ht...

> * Requiring new joiners to write a Glass Door review as part of their on-boarding process, presumably in an attempt to improve their rating.

My last company was like this. Desperate to get people to write reviews their first week.

Interesting, sounds like it would be useful to understand how long the person has been at the company when the review was written.

The company I left a few years ago did this in order to obfuscate the rampant issues that were being unaddressed.

The recipe was to hire in a bunch of college grads, and while they're still nervous about their first corporate gig, have the VP of Human Resources email a demand that they post a glowing review.

And, when the rating inevitably continues to be hammered by negatives, instead of addressing the patterns within the negative reviews, HR would send that review demand to the overseas team(s) where the jobs were even more tenuously-held.

While HR made glaringly obvious positive reviews, themselves, of course. Pretty insidious.

The site looks neat, but a few things off the top of my head - I have to sign in with LinkedIn, but it doesn't import any of my profile. And when adding a role, "Nearest City" has predefined values, none of which are even within a 3 hour drive. When I enter the city I'm actually in, I'm told it can't be empty.

One of the worst thing Glassdoor did was to make it mandatory for people to give reviews before reading reviews. You can see the low quality reviews people leave as a result of this.

It doesn't have to be a review. It can be a salary or something else.

Coercing people to provide it drops the signal to noise ratio imo - especially since there is no verification step.

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