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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Glassdoor is hopelessly spammed by HR departments, “Advice to management: none, they are wonderful!” and so on.

My old company did that. PR sent an email to all staff saying "please leave us a good review on Glassdoor". I checked and the week before four new reviews had come up, all using the same writing style, all incredibly positive. Stuff like "negatives: you have to do lots of hours, but you're paid well so I don't mind" (spoiler alert: only half of that sentence was truthful).

I reported all of them to Glassdoor and sent them the PR email, the reviews are still up months later.

edit: just checked again and everyone left fairly truthful 1* reviews in a short period of time a few weeks after I left, I'm guessing they did another round of "please leave positive reviews" and it backfired.

And for some reason these are the one that are displayed by the default "relevant" filter and the upvoted (more nuanced or critical) one are hidden.

Just checked and yup, all the planted five star reviews are at the top despite having no more than one "helpful" reports. Negative reviews with up to ten "helpful" reports are on at least page two. This is while sorting by "popular".

Seems to have taken the opposite strategy of Yelp, which bumps one star reviews to the top and makes companies pay to hide them. Or my ex-company is already paying, it's hard to tell.

Are they an "engaged employer" in the top right corner? If they are, my theory is that translates to "paying customer" hence the weighting given to the positive reviews.

Yes, they are. That theory makes a lot of sense tbh

This exactly.

I worked for one company where everyone who left started posting bad reviews. The next thing you know people who were still there were posting wonderful reviews and getting an "official response" from the company.

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