I noticed a local company I follow had fluctuating review counts between 30-45. I wrote a web scraper to see if reviews were being taken down, and for this company, over 20 1 or 2 star reviews have been taken down, but any new 5 star reviews stay.
Our company had a slew of negative reviews suddenly. Upon closer look, the reviewers were working in positions we had never employed anyone for. They were posting about an office they worked at in Israel (we are in the USA).
Turns out there was another startup in Israel who had a very similar name to ours. That company closed a big seed round and started hiring a bunch of people (and apparently they don’t treat their employees well, based on the reviews mistakenly left on our page).
The process of getting the reviews removed was a major pain. It requires multiple emails and phone calls with Glassdoor. Ironically, Glassdoor sales reps started up selling us on a premium Glassdoor account after we had a sudden uptick if views on our company (which were actually from people trying to see reviews for the other company in Israel) so we also leveraged the sales process to push Glassdoor into looking at the legitimacy of the reviews.
I definitely wouldn’t say it was an easy process. Glassdoor was, by default, resistant and skeptical about any complaint relating to a request to remove a review. It took multiple months (and persistence) to convince them the reviews were not for our company.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions about Glassdoor moderating reviews and removing bad ones. But also remember there are cases when reviews are not legitimate and should be removed.
(In addition to the example I provided above, another example is competing companies leaving negative reviews on competitor profiles to sabotage their hiring efforts).
Did you scrutinized positive reviews the same way or just glanced them over and went "yeah, five stars, this is good"?
All negative reviews were 100% accurate from my point of view and not insulting in any way. So if you see the "managed account" flag at Glassdoor, be careful ;)
It seems the trick is to say that the reviews contain "company internal information",...or something like that.
I do understand that they have their "own" system that automatically reviews posts and removes them. Sadly that hasn't worked out fantastically at my employer, they mostly remove these 5 star reviews.
- [Your review should be truthful and constitute your own personal opinion] -- Any review that contains false information that the company can easily prove is wrong can be removed.
- [Each individual is allowed one review, per employer, per year, per review type.] If the company can prove a review is a dup, it can be removed
- [We do not allow reviews that include negative comments about identifiable individuals outside of this group.] - A review saying "My coworker Alice was a real A Hole." can easily be removed
- [We realize talking about work can get emotionally charged, but we don't approve reviews that include certain profanities] -- Anything that's aggressively worded "I worked at this company, it fu* sucks" will be removed
I'd guess than 90% of Glassdoor reviews removed blatantly break their guidelines. There is probably another 10% that consist of companies trying to game the system, but it's impossible to know for sure.
[0] https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Community-Guidelines/en_U...
So, why does Glassdoor apparently listen to CEOs an lawyers when they claim employers cannot have reviews removed, when they appear to be doing just that?
You can flag them, and they'll get looked at - and their definitions of falsehoods or private info are obviously subjective, but it's been made clear to us they can't do anything just because we've paid.
Will see how the contract plays out, but I'm minded to believe them, part of the sales patter is that negative reviews actually help you weed out people who wouldn't fit in so they're already lining you up to think about having negative ones up.
That being said, and though I find their business model disgusting, we definitely weren't a hard sell for them.
It had the effect of flooding it with 4 and 5 star reviews from people who hasn't been around long enough to see any downsides to their job.
Meanwhile, as the company began imploding, the folks jumping ship mostly didn't bother to write a 1 star review on the way out.
Definitely rubbed me the wrong way, but besides that they were really great people. I don't know if they realize what bad taste this is, just don't care, or if it's really just one person with too much influence creating policy.
This was a while ago, so I can only imagine it's become more prevalent. I've come to believe this is pretty much accepted behaviour for SV companies, and I wouldn't put much weight into Glassdoor reviews beyond just checking for red flags.
On more than one occasion I've seen a blistering one star review, followed by a bunch of positive reviews that all came in within days. It was clearly a situation where someone at the company saw the low score, had an "uh-oh moment," and called in the cavalry to write positive reviews.
Plenty of startup founders boosted their rating by telling HR, family, friends, and foreign clickfarms to post 5 star Glassdoor reviews.
It's extremely easy to inflate your rating this way. Glassdoor does nothing to prevent it. There are small startups with more 5-star Glassdoor reviews than employees.
As long as your bots also upvote every other 5-star reviews, anyone looking at your review pool, sorted either by recency or "most helpful", will have to scroll through dozens of these bogus 5-star reviews before they get to any real negative review. By that point, the negative review will seem like a biased exception posted by a disgruntled employee - if they even get to it.
The worst aspect of this is how easy it is for truly terrible companies to royally screw their employees yet retain an eye-popping 4.2+ rating on Glassdoor. I've seen a couple of cases where companies badly mistreated employees, got a well-deserved torrent of 1-2 star reviews as a result, then flooded their pool with hundreds of fake 5-star reviews. Now these terrible companies, that truly do mistreat and abuse their workforce, have a Glassdoor page and review pool disguising them as a top 1% employer.