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This looks great I am very suspicious about the company and interview reviews part. Glassdoor destroyed trust by giving incentive to employers destroying trust

This looks great I am very suspicious about the company and interview reviews part. Glassdoor destroyed trust by giving incentive to employers destroying trust in reviews. I have a first hand experience about reviews I posted, and the fake reviews and then deletion of bad reviews of a company I worked for. It seems like any product offering public ratings will end up having fake ratings. What have you considered to make sure reviews remain legit?

t0mas88 3y ago
Same here. Glassdoor keeps saying everywhere that companies have no influence on the reviews. But they absolutely allow removal of bad reviews, even going as far as contacting our HR team offering it as a paid service.
- somsak2 3y ago
  What's funny is that these bad reviews actually do show up on the RSS feed, so you can read them even after they're removed.
  - t0mas88 3y ago
    Which proves the point that Glassdoor is lying :-)
    - maccard 3y ago
      Or they're technically telling the truth - the review hasn't been removed, it's just not visible on the website.
- ngc6677 3y ago
  Somehow it could be possible to created a "trusted review" system, based on existing tools. See "Comments & reactions" on https://profiles.joblist.today/companies/ https://profiles.joblist.today/companies/, where login is made with Github, and peers can "upvote" comments with reactions.
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  Whoever pays, has the power, so for Glassdoor that's obvious. Companies can basically "report" anything they don't like, and they do. My employer keeps asking us to "leave honest reviews" to help with hiring efforts. In practice that means they want us to leave GOOD reviews to raise rating scores on websites such as Glassdoor. Sorry HR, I'm not going to do your work for you.
- cj 3y ago
  At my 100% remote company, we got a negative review from someone saying the bathrooms were dirty in our office. (We've never had an office, but there's another company with a similar name as ours that does) We eventually got it removed, but it took an extreme amount of effort to convince them to take it down. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take a review down that isn't as easy to prove illegitimate. This was in 2020, so maybe things have devolved since then..
  - t0mas88 3y ago
    It's very easy, their sales team will reach out and tell you about the paid options to manage your company profile. That's why the whole website is so dishonest. They keep claiming reviews are not influenced by companies and at the same time pressuring those companies to pay to cleanup their profile.
romanhn 3y ago
To be perfectly honest, I don't have a great answer here yet. While the US has the Consumer Review Fairness Act, Glassdoor lost an important court case that saw a US court force them to furnish reviewer info to a non-US entity (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/glassdoor-ordered-to-out-some-anonymous-users-zuru-new-zealand.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...). Terrible precedent, IMO. Some of the early thinking I've done is around the system being able to verify that a user did in fact apply to a company (assuming company is a customer of Rolepad). That provides some initial guarantees about the author of the data. With some ATS integration, there could be fairly concrete numbers on "how quickly did X happen" that don't even need to be sourced from the candidate. That said, there is always a bit of a "he said, she said" with reviews, and I haven't fully figured out an obvious way forward here. I think the general sentiment I've seen is that Glassdoor and Yelp reviews should be treated with a grain of salt, but they're still better than nothing.
- pacerier 3y ago
  Another method is to aim for safe harbor. Consider where would folks share this information today, legally, and make your solution legally similar.
wqtz 3y ago
How do you verify the "integrity" of a system like this? I was doing business studies research stuff when blockchain was all the rage. The accounting integrity was a major buzzword around that circle. Nobody came up with anything concrete or utilitarian. The challenge is that you need to remove malicious reviews or spams. But at the same time that review system cannot be exploited. Is there a systematic way to do this? Throwing an idea here. What if there was a distributable append only database that obfuscated the content (reviews, company, user, company etc) with hash function only showed the action (new review, update review, delete review etc.)? The database should be shared across multiple stakeholders as single source database is easily corruptible. For each actions to go through, these stakeholder databases need to be verify them. Tis verification process essentially links these databases to a single system. Then once the verification is done the review can be added. To incentivize the storing and verification we need to offer an incentive of sort that is not money. As money corrupts everything and is the source of all evil it should be a form of token of gratitude that can be essentially transacted with other participants a form of pseudo currency. The value of the pseudo currency derives from everyone believing in the system. In fact we can probably create an algorithm that automates the verification process using LLM algorithm and historic patterns. Those LLM algorithms can run on the stakeholder machines preferably on GPU. Would a system like this work?

t0mas88 3y ago

Same here. Glassdoor keeps saying everywhere that companies have no influence on the reviews. But they absolutely allow removal of bad reviews, even going as far as contacting our HR team offering it as a paid service.

somsak2 3y ago
What's funny is that these bad reviews actually do show up on the RSS feed, so you can read them even after they're removed.
- t0mas88 3y ago
  Which proves the point that Glassdoor is lying :-)
  - maccard 3y ago
    Or they're technically telling the truth - the review hasn't been removed, it's just not visible on the website.
ngc6677 3y ago
Somehow it could be possible to created a "trusted review" system, based on existing tools. See "Comments & reactions" on https://profiles.joblist.today/companies/ https://profiles.joblist.today/companies/, where login is made with Github, and peers can "upvote" comments with reactions.
hashtag-til 3y ago
Whoever pays, has the power, so for Glassdoor that's obvious. Companies can basically "report" anything they don't like, and they do. My employer keeps asking us to "leave honest reviews" to help with hiring efforts. In practice that means they want us to leave GOOD reviews to raise rating scores on websites such as Glassdoor. Sorry HR, I'm not going to do your work for you.
cj 3y ago
At my 100% remote company, we got a negative review from someone saying the bathrooms were dirty in our office. (We've never had an office, but there's another company with a similar name as ours that does) We eventually got it removed, but it took an extreme amount of effort to convince them to take it down. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take a review down that isn't as easy to prove illegitimate. This was in 2020, so maybe things have devolved since then..
- t0mas88 3y ago
  It's very easy, their sales team will reach out and tell you about the paid options to manage your company profile. That's why the whole website is so dishonest. They keep claiming reviews are not influenced by companies and at the same time pressuring those companies to pay to cleanup their profile.

romanhn 3y ago

To be perfectly honest, I don't have a great answer here yet. While the US has the Consumer Review Fairness Act, Glassdoor lost an important court case that saw a US court force them to furnish reviewer info to a non-US entity (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/glassdoor-ordered-to-out-some-anonymous-users-zuru-new-zealand.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...). Terrible precedent, IMO. Some of the early thinking I've done is around the system being able to verify that a user did in fact apply to a company (assuming company is a customer of Rolepad). That provides some initial guarantees about the author of the data. With some ATS integration, there could be fairly concrete numbers on "how quickly did X happen" that don't even need to be sourced from the candidate. That said, there is always a bit of a "he said, she said" with reviews, and I haven't fully figured out an obvious way forward here. I think the general sentiment I've seen is that Glassdoor and Yelp reviews should be treated with a grain of salt, but they're still better than nothing.

pacerier 3y ago
Another method is to aim for safe harbor. Consider where would folks share this information today, legally, and make your solution legally similar.

wqtz 3y ago

How do you verify the "integrity" of a system like this? I was doing business studies research stuff when blockchain was all the rage. The accounting integrity was a major buzzword around that circle. Nobody came up with anything concrete or utilitarian. The challenge is that you need to remove malicious reviews or spams. But at the same time that review system cannot be exploited. Is there a systematic way to do this? Throwing an idea here. What if there was a distributable append only database that obfuscated the content (reviews, company, user, company etc) with hash function only showed the action (new review, update review, delete review etc.)? The database should be shared across multiple stakeholders as single source database is easily corruptible. For each actions to go through, these stakeholder databases need to be verify them. Tis verification process essentially links these databases to a single system. Then once the verification is done the review can be added. To incentivize the storing and verification we need to offer an incentive of sort that is not money. As money corrupts everything and is the source of all evil it should be a form of token of gratitude that can be essentially transacted with other participants a form of pseudo currency. The value of the pseudo currency derives from everyone believing in the system. In fact we can probably create an algorithm that automates the verification process using LLM algorithm and historic patterns. Those LLM algorithms can run on the stakeholder machines preferably on GPU. Would a system like this work?