5 ms·

Not to hijack, but do you or your spouse have an opinion on the WSJ story about companies intensely curating their reviews (maybe even paying/threatening the em

by cdolan 7y ago

Not to hijack, but do you or your spouse have an opinion on the WSJ story about companies intensely curating their reviews (maybe even paying/threatening the employees and/or Glassdoor)? 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.

shiftpgdn 7y ago
I had been contacted by a glass door rep about two years ago who "vaguely promised" they could remove our bad reviews if we signed up for one of their paid services.
ben1040 7y ago
I used to work for a place where, during the 60 or 90 day check-in with HR after you got hired, HR would put a hard sell on you to write a Glassdoor review. 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.
- vidarh 7y ago
  Anyone trying to push me into leaving a review would be a massive red flag that'd instantly make me look for a new job and ensure I'd leave a 1-star review once I had one...
- rapind 7y ago
  I experienced this too. In fact it was within the first couple weeks of being hired that you were encouraged to post to Glassdoor (and a Linkedin post that they curated). 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.
  - ben1040 7y ago
    I've also definitely sorted by date on Glassdoor and ignored any reviews that looked like they were posted all at once. 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.
- asdffdsa 7y ago
  I have a theory that this happens in Amazon to cheap products (e.g. it's great the first couple months and breaks after 6, but the review is made several weeks after the first product). The reviews mean less as a result, and the only good signal is a heartfelt review from someone who has used the product (or in Glassdoor's case, has worked there a while) a while (and it's worth scrolling pages of the meaningless review to find them).
cj 7y ago
It’s worth mentioning that sometimes there are legitimate reasons for removing reviews. 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).
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  >Our company had a slew of negative reviews suddenly. Upon closer look Did you scrutinized positive reviews the same way or just glanced them over and went "yeah, five stars, this is good"?
  - dymk 7y ago
    Why does that matter?
  - OJFord 7y ago
    If you received a load of erroneous and accidental negative reviews, would you honestly just ignore it hoping and assuming that it'll be levelled out by the erroneous and accidental positive reviews?
wastedhours 7y ago
Have a paid contract with Glassdoor and they're exceptionally strict and make it known they'll only take down reviews containing blatant falsehoods or proprietary information. 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.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
This sounds like a great weekend project idea: a website that captures removed reviews from Glassdoor and computes a real rating.
- jasonrhaas 7y ago
  fakespot.com but for companies.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    If FakeSpot is doing well enough to be hiring people, this weekend project might actually have business value to it.
eastendguy 7y ago
I can confirm this. I personally know of two companies were accurate but negative reviews were taken down by Glassdoor. One was the company I worked for. In this case it was triggered at the request of the CEO, who was heavily criticized in the reviews. He made HR sign up for a Glassdoor Premium account, so that they took the reviews down. 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.
- rhacker 7y ago
  So Glassdoor is pay for prestige.
  - evv 7y ago
    Just like Yelp. Quite tragic that this is the business model that seems to succeed.. if the law protected individuals over corporate greed, this tactic would be illegal.
  - keltor 7y ago
    Contrary to what the GP is saying, Glassdoor seems EXTREMELY resistant unless the review is actually fake and/or contains proprietary information. It's absolutely nothing like Yelp. 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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - cj 7y ago
      Another reason why Glassdoor takes down negative reviews is that often the 1 or 2 star reviews don't follow their content guidelines [0]. - [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_US https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Community-Guidelines/en_U...
NeverFade 7y ago
In my experience, it's far easier and more common for companies to simply flood their review pool with bogus positive reviews, rather than bother about negative 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.

by cdolan 7y ago

shiftpgdn 7y ago

I had been contacted by a glass door rep about two years ago who "vaguely promised" they could remove our bad reviews if we signed up for one of their paid services.

ben1040 7y ago

I used to work for a place where, during the 60 or 90 day check-in with HR after you got hired, HR would put a hard sell on you to write a Glassdoor review. 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.

vidarh 7y ago
Anyone trying to push me into leaving a review would be a massive red flag that'd instantly make me look for a new job and ensure I'd leave a 1-star review once I had one...
rapind 7y ago
I experienced this too. In fact it was within the first couple weeks of being hired that you were encouraged to post to Glassdoor (and a Linkedin post that they curated). 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.
- ben1040 7y ago
  I've also definitely sorted by date on Glassdoor and ignored any reviews that looked like they were posted all at once. 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.
asdffdsa 7y ago
I have a theory that this happens in Amazon to cheap products (e.g. it's great the first couple months and breaks after 6, but the review is made several weeks after the first product). The reviews mean less as a result, and the only good signal is a heartfelt review from someone who has used the product (or in Glassdoor's case, has worked there a while) a while (and it's worth scrolling pages of the meaningless review to find them).

cj 7y ago

It’s worth mentioning that sometimes there are legitimate reasons for removing reviews. 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).

NullPrefix 7y ago
>Our company had a slew of negative reviews suddenly. Upon closer look Did you scrutinized positive reviews the same way or just glanced them over and went "yeah, five stars, this is good"?
- dymk 7y ago
  Why does that matter?
- OJFord 7y ago
  If you received a load of erroneous and accidental negative reviews, would you honestly just ignore it hoping and assuming that it'll be levelled out by the erroneous and accidental positive reviews?

wastedhours 7y ago

Have a paid contract with Glassdoor and they're exceptionally strict and make it known they'll only take down reviews containing blatant falsehoods or proprietary information. 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.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

This sounds like a great weekend project idea: a website that captures removed reviews from Glassdoor and computes a real rating.

jasonrhaas 7y ago
fakespot.com but for companies.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  If FakeSpot is doing well enough to be hiring people, this weekend project might actually have business value to it.

eastendguy 7y ago

I can confirm this. I personally know of two companies were accurate but negative reviews were taken down by Glassdoor. One was the company I worked for. In this case it was triggered at the request of the CEO, who was heavily criticized in the reviews. He made HR sign up for a Glassdoor Premium account, so that they took the reviews down. 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.

rhacker 7y ago
So Glassdoor is pay for prestige.
- evv 7y ago
  Just like Yelp. Quite tragic that this is the business model that seems to succeed.. if the law protected individuals over corporate greed, this tactic would be illegal.
- keltor 7y ago
  Contrary to what the GP is saying, Glassdoor seems EXTREMELY resistant unless the review is actually fake and/or contains proprietary information. It's absolutely nothing like Yelp. 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - cj 7y ago
    Another reason why Glassdoor takes down negative reviews is that often the 1 or 2 star reviews don't follow their content guidelines [0]. - [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_US https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Community-Guidelines/en_U...

NeverFade 7y ago

In my experience, it's far easier and more common for companies to simply flood their review pool with bogus positive reviews, rather than bother about negative 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.