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The very idea of a website that encourages people to anonymously critique employers is ludicrous and irresponsible. I think its use is widespread because it mak
by ilamont 9y ago
The very idea of a website that encourages people to anonymously critique employers is ludicrous and irresponsible. I think its use is widespread because it makes money. That fact impresses HR executives and the public, leading them all to base business decisions on admittedly untrustworthy information.
Just think about it: Any disgruntled employee or job applicant can trash a company publicly. An HR department can spam Glassdoor, singing its own praises. (It seems this happened with the company you quit.) Honest comments will get lost. Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by making participants accountable. (The argument for anonymity is that people wouldn’t post honest comments if employers knew who they were. Duh. That justifies graffiti?) They make money with every posting. That’s how Glassdoor is like the job boards.
In fact, Glassdoor is a job board. Like LinkedIn, the site uses the honeypot of “community” to lure you into an ulterior revenue model.
https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-reviews https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-...
- mandelbrotwurst 9y ago"Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by making participants accountable" Is this true? Do the users not value quality? Surely they'd be more likely to use and continue to use the site (and by extension, increasing Glassdoor's revenue) if they perceive it to contain useful, objective reviews?
- xchip 9y agoI see it as a TripAdvisor for jobs, why would that be a bad thing?
- tomasien 9y agoThis person has had to recruit for companies with bad Glassdoor reviews and it has made their job harder.
- empath75 9y agoYeah I have turned down multiple recruiters flat because of glass door reviews. They often don’t even want to tell me the company until I drag it out of them.
- FireBeyond 9y agoI've had recruiters tell me that I will have to go through interviews with them and potentially even someone from the company before they will reveal the name. No. I'm not playing "hour for something good" with my interview time.
- sidlls 9y agoThis is probably more because they're afraid you'll skip the middle man and apply directly than because they fear you'll look something up on Glassdoor.
- bmelton 9y agoBecause without strong fraud prevention, stuff like this happens: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the...
- perl4ever 9y agoThere is no source of information that doesn't require engaging with a critical mindset in order to make it useful. Anything that you interpret by rote is easily gamed. As other people have said, this particular fraud is meaningless because it doesn't fit the profile of the sort of thing that would cause problems for users. Misinformation about a real restaurant is an actual problem. Ratings of non-existent restaurants don't matter.
- bmelton 9y agoIf you can defraud a site like TravelAdvisor to turn your shed into the best restaurant ever, then you can defraud a site like TravelAdvisor to turn you bad restaurant into a good one, or a competitor's good restaurant into a bad one.
- perl4ever 9y agoDo you have an argument to support your opinion? I think your assertion is obviously false. If the restaurant doesn't exist, nobody will provide real reviews. If it does, they may.
- emodendroket 9y agoI'm not exactly surprised that as head hunter would dislike a service that makes his job harder by reducing information asymmetry.
- tomasien 9y agoExactly
- hux_ 9y agoHow do you tell if it's increasing Information corruption or reducing Information asymmetry? Nobody has an objectitive view. Glassdoor isn't going to come out and say they are producing negative population scale effects, just like Facebook didn't. Once upon a time when Wikileaks/Arab Spring was unfolding everyone thought reducing information asymmetry would be net positive. But here we are with a 24*7 fake news culture in the "information age", and Snowden sitting in Russia of all places.
- emodendroket 9y agoI don't think "fake news" is actually a uniquely modern issue.
- Clubber 9y agoIt's not. It's the norm. It was once called "Yellow Journalism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Reading the opening paragraph, to me it describes just about any news source today: Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a US term for a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.[1] Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism.
- hux_ 9y agoYa but what nobody gets is simplicity and scale has changed. Some guy with too much time on his hands on twitter or YouTube or FB can unintentionally (cause it's all chaotic) topple a govt or force change policy change.