Ask HN: How reliable are Glassdoor reviews?

A personal anecdote:

I was working at a small (~30 person) company that had 9 developers leave within the span of a few months due to the same set of fundamental complaints.

Several people posted reviews on Glassdoor. The reviews were negative but did not violate Glassdoor's content policy as far as any of us could tell (no naming individuals or making personal accusations, etc). Company had a 1.x star rating for a time.

After a bit, the company becomes "actively engaged" on Glassdoor and responds to several of the complaints. Even posts a couple of 5-star reviews from managers praising the company. Whatever.

Anyway, shortly after that one of us noticed that several of the negative reviews had disappeared. Someone logged in and saw that their review had been rejected for "violating the content policy." Their best guess was that someone from the company had flagged it and Glassdoor took it down, and that's where I have two issues with Glassdoor that inform my perspective on the quality of their reviews:

1. They did not notify the people whose reviews were taken down that their review had been removed. If they hadn't been closely following the company's profile they never would have noticed.

2. Glassdoor didn't provide any specific feedback on why the review was taken down.

So, because of this experience I don't have much faith in Glassdoor reviews to be accurate: I believe that Glassdoor makes it possible for companies who want to "manage" their profile to do so. I don't think they do it explicitly, but it certainly looks to me like their process is designed to enable it. Also, this lines up with their incentives: they make their money from the employers, no?

I generally operate on the heuristic that negative reviews (if well written) are accurate while positive reviews are never accurate.

Modern companies cannot “be good” in any ways other than high compensation, consistently high end benefits, and retraining people instead of firing them.

Any other description of a good attribute must be ignored. Even if it’s accurate, the company has no obligation to keep it that way, you don’t know the deep political story about it, these are rarely promises anyone can enforce.

Most companies are wildly horrible places to work, in ways that have been studied and documented since Moral Mazes.

This is why it’s imperative to negotiate very uncompromisingly on things like salary, bonuses, and severance agreements, no matter how much people pressure you to believe you can’t negotiate them.

To win a job negotiation you simply have to not want what the other person is offering, and the reason is simple: every job that anyone ever tries to sell you on, for all time, is a total lemon, and ought to require exactly what you want to be paid to do that job. Any time you walk away from a job, you’re making the right choice, because avoidance of the cognitive and behavoral dysfunction that any organization will beat you with (emphatically not hyperbole) is better for you in the long run.

The only reasonable exception is when you’re truly desperate because of some resource depletion, like you’ve been unemployed and have no choice but to compromise. Obviously you can compromise on other dimensions if you just happen to want to, but from the point of view of the business transaction that is a job, the only practically enforceable parts are stated compensation and benefits you can get in writing.

The earlier you realize you must look at all forms of employment this way, the better off you’ll be.

My old company's reviews are full of lies (through omission). Basically, the company fights vigorously with anyone who posts a negative review (and they somehow manage getting them removed). Anyone who posts a positive review remains :)

Alternative to Glassdoor: Ask an insider. Find old (former) employees on Linked to discuss. Check attrition---the best measure (how many folks joined the firm recently - how many left). If it's a revolving door, don't go there.

I personally don't give Glassdoor reviews any credence, and I've never checked the site during the process of engaging with a potential employer. I think there is too much potential for bias in both directions: people who are leaving often have emotional laundry to air, and people who are staying often have a corresponding need to defend that choice. It just seems to me like any actually useful information is likely to be overwhelmed by these factors. Instead of using a site like Glassdoor that attracts people with these sort of motivations I would rather gather my information on the side band from other sources: who works there, github repos, articles employees have posted, offhand comments on hacker news, etc.

I have worked at one company that paid employees for fake positive reviews.

I’ve worked at another company that ran witch hunts on a regular basis in order to flush out the authors of negative reviews. Management spent time reading between the lines in order to figure out who the authors were based on their writing style.

I had a lot of fun with them by posting truthful negative reviews written in a variety of styles that matched no particular person’s style in full, yet left management believing that they were on the cusp of identifying the author. It was a lot of fun until I realized that these asshats were spending valuable time on stupidity instead of righting the ship, but by then it was already too late.

Anecdotally and just from my own experience they've been accurate but often lack context for an outsider to correctly interpret them.

I have seen cases where the reviews are mixed and they're generally accurate. The problem is that they're describing different departments and a candidate on the outside would not know that, so they'd not understand that one department is a lot more pleasant than another.

From my experience the people writing the most glowing positive reviews are doing it to get you to work there as they are somehow involved in hiring and do so to counter any of the genuine negative reviews. I have seen this happen first hand as a push by a recruitment team once a few honest negative reviews appeared.

There are enough people within a company with a vested interest in having a good image on glassdoor to create a strong inventive to make it look better than it is.

In my experience they used to be extremely accurate until 1-2 years ago. I believe that in the last two yers companies are beginning to pay more attention and try to do the possible to overcome bad reviews. I agree on the complete lack of context. In general they are still a good tool but as already said they must be taken with a grain of salt.

I have some friends with knowledge of companies that are rated as a "best place to work" by Glassdoor. The companies heavily promote their achievement on social media and during recruiting. My friends tell me about the shocking number of employment lawsuits these companies have settled, incredible employee turnover, and general egregious things happening within the company. Unfortunately, non-disclosure agreements prevent those stories from ever really surfacing.

I've heard enough to take all Glassdoor reviews and ratings with a huge grain of salt. At this point, companies actively advertising their Glassdoor status is more a red flag for me, in the same way the I never stay at a hotel that advertises it has clean rooms. If you have to explicitly tell me you're a good place to work, then you probably aren't.

In my experience, it's best to look at companies with Glassdoor reviews collectively along a single axis: Are they really bad? Or are they potentially not really bad? I usually try to find a shortcut along a path less traveled, and so I take to LinkedIn or Github (or IRC!) to find people working the job I'm looking for at the company I'm interested in, and then talk to those people. Glassdoor can sometimes reveal when companies have recently been a really terrible deal for employees, but I've had more than one negative review not even make it past moderation (for no reason I could discern). They're clearly scrubbing the stains from company images, one way or the other.

There are a suspicious number with things like “advice to management: none, they are great!” that can be immediately discounted

Also remember that Glassdoor’s business model is such that their customers are the companies being “reviewed” (who post jobs on there)

I previously worked for company X, employing some technology workers but X was primarily not a technology company.

Somehow there existed in Glass Glassdoor a "Company X" company as well as a "Company X Technology" company, which was serving as a magnet to attract some exceedingly low reviews, even as compared to the primary "Company X" company. Company X had an average rating of about 3.5 from thousands of employees, whereas Company X Technology had an average review of < 2.0 from a few dozen employees.

There was no organizational ambiguity whatsoever which should have resulted in there being 2 separate company records, any more than there should have been separate "companies" for HR, Accounting, etc.

I contacted Glassdoor, and after some back and forth they said they would do nothing to fix the nonsensical company split without the approval of Company X, because Company X was a paying customer of Glassdoor.

Although I do not have any reason to suspect the integrity of value of the actually reviews themselves, the profit-based dishonesty that Glassdoor itself demonstrated, created some doubt in what I see on their site. I doubt most prospective job seekers happen to notice two separate companies, either (or both) of which it might behoove them to peruse.

Very reliable.

As far as I’ve seen, it’s the closest thing to being able to buy an ex-employee a beer and listen.

There is a substantial amount of astroturfing on Glassdoor. Best to read the neutral and negative reviews, and ignore the positive ones and overall rating.

Some companies intentionally build a glassdoor reputation. I take it with a grain of salt. It has a similar business model to BBB, but not as bad yet.

As always with reviews: The more negative the experience, the higher the chance someone will post a review. So I usually ignore the 1 star reviews and go more for the 3 star reviews etc.

But really, just read the review rather than looking at the rating. Even then keep in mind that most happy people don't post reviews online (unless it's really good).

Depends. From what I've seen, they don't verify the user actually worked at the company in question. Or at least, it doesn't work too well, since I've seen people accidentally leaving their reviews on companies with similar names to their own rather than the actual one(there had never been someone with said name at the company in question, and they were from the other side of the world). I've also heard a few cases of ex employees each leaving multiple negative reviews under the same job title, and employers getting the site to remove reviews that made them look bad.

Some company pages probably have more accurate reviews than others though. Depends how hard the company fights to get negative ones taken down, or how many disgruntled users/non employees leave reviews on it.

So yeah, it depends.

Not really, it's very easy to game glassdoor reviews. My previous employer had 90 or so fake 5 star reviews to have an outstanding profile.

One good thing about glassdoor reviews is the Helpful button, this gives us some authenticity for negative or positive reviews.

Since you asked "Do the expectations the site give match up with what you have experienced?" I'll say no, at least where I'm working now,the reviews do not match my experience here at all. The reviews are rather negative, written by people who quit because they didn't like it, or were fired for various reasons. So most of the people motivated to write reviews had reason to write only negative reviews. I'm super happy here and haven't written a review.

Glassdoor is a useful tool but remember:

1. You're likely to get true negatives

2. You may get false positives

Ie, genuine negative statements are hard to fake (you can tell if someone has an axe to grind, vs a detailed report about practices that are believable but bad). However companies that had bad reviews one they get wind of them often ask staff to write good ones, and a lot of them have a culture where not doing a favour will hurt you.

There is little middle ground. Reviews are either disgruntled [often ex-] employees, or prompted or just bought.

That is not to say reviews are useless. 100 individual complaints about late payment are probably worth noting.

I'd ignore positive, and the bottom 25% of negative. What you're left with might indicate real problems an average employee might face.

I knew an investment advisory firm's record. I wanted to see what employees would say about the firm on Glassdoor. Employees that had left gave me a good indication of the firm's prowess. The review's were accurate from employees. Employees gave negative reviews. (Former management gave glowing reviews.)

Many years ago, I read reviews about Google before joining. None of what I experienced matched what was stated or only did so "technically." Even now, the reviews still sound the same. Either I had an unusual (ly poor) experience, or the reviews are questionable.

Honesty only comes from someone angry at 2am with a MacBook Pro. I feel many negative reviews are revealing - but take it with a grain of salt because the good reviews just DON'T have the same amount of passion.

How reliable are any online reviews?

One problem with Glassdoor ratings is that companies can vary wildly by department, location, and even team, and that’s not reflected in the reviews.

Great question!

Reading a company's Glassdoor reviews takes practice, similar to how judging wheather you will like a movie based on the Imdb reviews, or whether ou should buy a product on Amazon based on the reviews. You get better at it by working at a lot of companies and seeing various failure/success cases [and matching them to how it looks on Glassdoor]. Your NN needs a few training cycles to make good predictions :)

Assuming we're talking about tech/startup companies, keep in mind that in some sense, almost all companies (with the exception of a couple/year) eventually become "failures". What I mean is that all these companies raise money by making big promises, but then very few hit their goals: almost nobody becomes the next FB/G/Uber/Dropbox/Spotify. Somewhere between year 5-10 these companies "fail", and by fail I mean their YoY growth goes below ~25%. At this point all companies start trashing: old talent will leave, and a cycle starts, where different things are tried ("we need microservices!", "we need an experiences product guy to tell us what to do!", "our engineers are not good enough!", "we need to hire more people in the US!", "we need to push hard on sales!"), almost always by hiring new managers, who then hire new people with this focus, etc. Again, this almost always doesn't work out, we know this simply because there are only so many G/FB/etc. During this cycle, as people come and go, focus is changed, pivots are made, it leads to churn. Most companies also experience layoffs, or at least partial layoffs [in some teams].

What I wrote above, almost all companies have that, even the ones where otherwise the culture is okay/good, people are honest, the co-founders are well meaning, etc. So in the "best case", you should expect to find an imprint of the above on Glassdoor. If additionally there are "stupid"/people/culture problems, like "the Head of Product is never in the office" or "the CTO thinks we should write webapps in x86 Assembly" or "the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing refuse to talk to each other", "the COO is an asshole" you should be able to pick that up from the reviews. (Btw. read `Bad Blood` about Theranos for some good stories...)

For a company that's super-young, like <5 yrs, I would want there to be good growth, no culture problems, so I would expect the company to have excellent Glassdoor reviews. Later stage companies, I would expect a good mix of bad and good reviews, and I would keep an eye out for culture/people comments, esp. if there are many saying the same thing. For BigCos like FB/G, it doesn't make sense to read Glassdoor, it generally makes sense to work there, and your experience will depend on what role/team you end up in.

Another thing, I generally disregard reviews that are written by people who still work there. I think reviews by people who left are more valuable. I think the principal component I look at it, of the people who are no longer there, what % leave a mostly negative review, and what % leave a very negative review (and are these highly correlated). Based on the last 2, with calibration, you should be able to get a reasonable picture.

Some companies make employees sign a non-disparagement agreement when people leave. If you write a negative review on glassdoor and they figure out you wrote it, you’d be violating that agreement. I don’t think you have to sign this agreement though.