The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews
careerfair.io
careerfair.io
When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment.
At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company.
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.
A week later my own review was removed for a generic content policy violation.
Goes without saying I don't trust Glassdoor for much.
Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn’t change much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019 are probably still good now, which is boring.
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
I think it has to be a nonprofit or individual who isn't doing it to make any money, though. If it's a money-maker, you can't trust it.
Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.
Most people do trust them, but shouldn't.
Of course misbehaving companies would probably stop spending there, but that might not be a bad thing.
It is possible to exist in this space with a potential conflict, as long as you position yourself appropriately. If your interest is to serve "decent" companies by providing them with interested candidates, it can work.
It'll work fine until the site decides chasing profit is more important than integrity of the system, so probably right around the time they're looking for more funding.
Here's their operating model, which sounds like a mix of paid brand manager subscriptions and advertising: https://support.productreview.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/36000...
lol. the current amazon scam is to purchase the product (ship to a random address to defeat “common address” detection) then leave the fake review
for amazon the receipt is guaranteed authentic as the product will have been verifiably purchased on amazon. for a 3p site receipts can be trivially fabricated
I'm wondering as there are quite a handful of fake receipt generators on the internet
Not so much positive reviews, but negative reviews are believed.
It's not so much that I'd read the reviews, but ranking of results is fatally flawed thanks to these practices.
For many queries (restaurant in town X, book in genre Y) there are simply so many candidate results that ranking is the one and only thing to determine a (much, MUCH) smaller candidate set that the customer might actually engage with. How often do you click through to page 2 of your search results?
Probably not, I think. They're more likely to be employees or friends/family of the company doing it because they were required or asked to.
However, when searching out the low-down on a potential new employer, I only read the one and two star reviews - if they're pretty spurious then I feel more comfortable taking a role there. If however the poor reviews contain lots of pretty specific complaints, I find them more believable that the single sentence "everything is awesome here" style reviews.
I and other reviewers had left negative reviews for Cosuno Ventures GmbH as it's an incredibly toxic and horrible place to work in. I received a take-down notice from a German Google Maps review employee saying that Cosuno is claiming it's a false review and they don't know how who am I. Even though I worked at the company for 4 months with the CTO and had responded to the e-mail with documents signed by the CEO and CTO.
They're rocking a 5 star review now. I didn't receive a response from Google and my appeal has been ignored. I still have the company's t-shirt in the countryside.
I bet I'd be at risk of getting sued in Germany even if I wrote a positive review about a company. The moment you post an opinion online you are opening yourself as a target.
Like "Put in great effort" = absolute shit
As a result, I chose to write a detailed review explaining why I thought she was unprofessional, citing examples. Of course, my review got nuked.
Same happened with a photo shop that screw up a photo development for some films. I left a factual review, with a sample in pictures. I can see my review with my account, but no one else can.
Your review got shadow-removed. That's a new one on me.
It was so obvious, any fake review written by HR will always have "keep doing what you're doing!" in the "advice to management" section. Like, even a moderately happy employee will actually have something to say in the "advice to management" section. Only a shill will say, "Keep doing what you're doing!"
A cottage industry of liars. I was pretty naive in college and I still would have been skeptical about that.
Luckily, just like Amazon reviews, it's pretty easy to determine worthwhile info from how specific and balanced it is. The aggregate scores are obviously worthless, because either shills or spurned employees taint the mix.
I enjoy when there are responses from the business: that can often show egotistical management that thinks their poo doesn't stink.
There seriously needs to be a watchdog group or AI service (startup idea!) that vets reviews with heuristics like anomaly detection for VPN ip address reviews in succession or browser fingerprinting.
Also ChatGPT is gonna make writing unique reviews a thing of the past. Expect fake reviews sounding indistinguishable from genuine human writing. We are screwed.
I’ve always just assumed glassdoor was a fake / scam site since.
Recently: iAnnotate – Whatever happened to the web as an annotation system? (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559758
I took the interview anyway because I really needed work at the time. Got some 1-on-1 time with the IT guys and the first thing they said was,
“You read the reviews on Glassdoor, didn’t you?” “Yes..” “Well, don’t worry, IT is pretty isolated from all that”
Cool, I guess?
Next, I got some time with a VP. He saw on my resume that I’d done some work for a Christian church. He said,
“Yeah, I love to debate religion at the water cooler!”
Had he taken some time to get to know me, he’d know I’m not religious and probably would have held his tongue.
I got offered the job. Naturally, I didn’t take it.
Like others have said, Glassdoor is good to see problem spots in negative reviews. Positive reviews are meaningless in my eyes.
For reference, the bank was called Bank of Internet at the time. They’ve since rebranded to Axos and I continue to recommend against them. I know nothing about their financial credibility, but I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.
This is likely some cultural issue (I'm not from the United States), but I don't get what some person of power who loves debating religion at the water cooler makes the company a hostile work environment. Quite the opposite: in my gut feeling the fact that religion (a topic that has a tendency to cause heated discussions) can be discussed at the water cooler is rather a point of evidence that the work environment is really healthy.
I also wouldn't generalize from this poster's anecdote to conclude "This is likely some cultural issue" in the US. I guess religion is a touchy subject in the US compared to more homoegenous nations like in the EU, and a rule of thumb I'd always heard is to avoid it in the office. (They used to say the same thing about politics in the office but that definitely went out the window these last 10 years.)
Worst case scenario, the boss is trying to discriminate based on religion, and trying to find out more about the subordinate’s personal beliefs. Best case scenario, boss is for whatever reason curious, but displays lack of knowledge of labor laws and best practices (in the context of asking to discuss with a newbie who they have no prior relationship with).
After a working relationship had been established, I could see religion as a as a casual topic being reasonable depending on how what their relationship is like, but as an introduction? Forget about it.
But then I'm not paranoid , and Ive never worked anyplace in 20 years where I feel people are being dishonest or disingenuous or playing any sort of games. especially not mind games, that's fucking absurd to me that you would even think that at all.
What sort of people are you working for, that sounds like hell.
I've always been in offices, and worked for managers I've gone and got drunk with and talked about all sorts of shit. it's never been an issue.
If US office culture Is as you describe it, it sounds fucking awful.
I think it’s about minimizing liability. I wouldn’t want a work dynamic to turn toxic due to a coworker’s prejudice or some disagreement we had debating over the water cooler. At work you focus on work, sure you can have some chit chat but generally these topics are breached after being acquainted with someone.
Having seen their internal Blind, social Slack channels and culture vs. the Glassdoor reviews, and then submitting my review which really "went against the grain" of Glassdoor, it was clear there was something going on. I just didn't care enough to find out.
As these systems age, I think they're all missing one feature - "what are ratings or reviews from the past 6 months".
I ordered a play kitchen based on reviews and then I found it to be poor quality, I wrote a review which was never published without any reason given
As such, I don't really trust positive reviews anymore, especially, there
I only mostly trust yelp reviews
And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading.
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).
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.
If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.
Example: Everyone who even knows someone who makes $500K at Facebook seems to love posting about it here, but nobody who makes $100K there seems to feel the need to boast about it.
There are tons of low level employees posting their salaries. If you work in those roles, that data could be more valuable to a candidate than Glassdoor's amorphous projections.
I think the user behavior that facilitates this is the same behavior you see represented on Blind.
https://www.levels.fyi/offerings/
They also have users upload W2s, offer letters, and supporting documents in addition to proof of identity.
https://www.levels.fyi/verified/
They have their own job advertisement business and they partner with third party recruiting companies to get anonymous data about offers candidates receive.
They also just take having accurate compensation information seriously so they do things like outlier and forgery detection as well as seeming to have a much better algorithm for processing the information they receive.
It's possible, but I know that salary information isn't at all what I'm interested in learning from such sites.
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.
Of course, reviews like "all good, none bad" or "all bad, the worst" are not informative.
Some interesting data can be gleaned about salaries, or the interview process. But, again, it needs to be taken as statistics, not as honest detailed descriptions.
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.
Reviews in general have grown unreliable as incentive alignments have shifted.
After this personal whoring, I was sure to leave a complementary negative review from a shill account.
Something innocent-looking, like a double question mark, or a double exclamation.
I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, provided there was nothing forcing them to be positive or repercussions for not doing it (or for leaving a negative review).
Most people review things only at the extremes (usually negative) unless they are prompted. That’s why Amazon sends people emails with questions or asking for a review. If a company asks their employees to leave positive reviews, and the employees generally like the place and are willing, that seems OK to me. I’ve lived in apartments that have done this and noticed when looking at reviews for others that they must have done the same.
Yeah, it doesn't seem OK to me. The power differential is such that there's no way for a company to ask that of employees without the employees feeling like they have to make the review positive, or less negative than they otherwise might have. So I consider such reviews highly unreliable. That companies do this sort of thing is one of the reasons why I think reviews are pretty close to worthless.
Anytime you hear one side of the story, we'll you're hearing one side of the story. Most situations are not black and white, most have context and nuance.
I've seen employees leave because the company behaved badly. I've seen employess leave when they behaved badly. I've seen situations where both sides had legitimate complaints.
Obviously no person posts something like "they fired me cause I'm a dick". But plenty of people do get fired for perfectly valid reasons. Companies will very seldom talk about firings publically, it's too dangerous to do so. So basically just be aware that people who have been fired are, well, unreliable witnesses to how that came about.
Of course there are plenty of bad companies. It eould be good yo know who they are. Im not sure employee reviews from ex-workers is meaningful. I -know- reviews from current employees is not meaningful. Which makes the value of review sites questionable.
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.
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.
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.
Its not.
Its utterly useless.
Same goes for some state agencies, file a complaint, but turns into a response back and forth, until someone finally gives up responding, and default closed.
Systems are designed to make you give up and go away.
The reimbursement was denied, so I appealed. COVID lockdowns were active, and the petty bureaucrat on charge of my appeal barely knew how to use her phone. She said the request was denied due to illegible documentation, which was bullshit.
They announced that the appeal was still undecided, but they wanted to grant themselves an extension of several weeks to study it more closely. I appealed the extension, and presently I was mailed a check for the full amount.
How much is your time worth? Is $20 worth an hour of wrangling bureaucracy?
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
How so?
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.
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?).
So the people leaving would only have negative views that strongly skew the actual appearance of how a job may be.
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.
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.
This is why I've left 90% of the jobs I've left. In none of those cases was my leaving a reflection of anything bad about the company.
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.
I don't know if this is to prevent fakes but they lost me, at least for now.
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.
Which is kinda funny because the free market itself is advertised based on how great it is - when there's information transparency.
Or were maybe involved in their creation.
I kinda get it... The pressure for a perfect 5 stars is immensive when every single competitor has it.
Same case with Glassdoor — dissing paying customers through your audience is never good for business.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CaseGuard-Reviews-E7449339...
Their Google reviews are even stranger
I'd love to know
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?
Trustpilot seems to game reviews too.
This seems like an unsolvable problem with online reviews in general. However I generally find Google Maps reviews for restaurants fairly reliable. You'd think with the amount of data they slurp up they could cut out fake reviews based on location data alone. Maybe it's just confirmation bias on my end though.
Too bad the employer would be an adversary here.
Exactly. Do you really want to trust your ability to keep paying your bills to Glassdoor's infosec? In return for nothing but the satisfaction of speaking your mind to an audience of non-responsive strangers?
fdict = dict((s,f) for (s,f) in zip(SCHEMA, funcs))If the users are behind CGNAT you cannot rely on the IP address.
I don't know what Glassdoor does in that case though.