How Companies Secretly Boost Their Glassdoor Ratings (wsj.com) 96
From a report: Last summer, employees of Guaranteed Rate posted a stream of negative reviews about the mortgage broker on Glassdoor, a company-ratings website. The company's rating on Glassdoor, which is determined by employee feedback, fell to 2.6 stars out of 5. Concerned that negative reviews could hurt recruiting, Guaranteed Rate CEO Victor Ciardelli instructed his team to enlist employees likely to post positive reviews, said a person familiar with his instructions. In September and October these employees flooded Glassdoor with hundreds of five-star ratings. The company rating now sits at 4.1.
Glassdoor has become an important arbiter of employee sentiment in today's highly competitive job market. A Wall Street Journal investigation shows it can be manipulated by employers trying to sway opinion in their favor. An analysis of millions of anonymous reviews posted on Glassdoor's site identified more than 400 companies with unusually large single-month increases in reviews. During the vast majority of these surges, the ratings were disproportionately positive compared with the surrounding months, the Journal's analysis shows. Glassdoor's problem echoes the challenged faced by other online rating platforms, who are trying to ensure their rankings are real and maintain users' trust. Amazon.com, local-business site Yelp and hotel-and-restaurant site TripAdvisor have all had to fend off attempts to game reviews and ratings.
Glassdoor has become an important arbiter of employee sentiment in today's highly competitive job market. A Wall Street Journal investigation shows it can be manipulated by employers trying to sway opinion in their favor. An analysis of millions of anonymous reviews posted on Glassdoor's site identified more than 400 companies with unusually large single-month increases in reviews. During the vast majority of these surges, the ratings were disproportionately positive compared with the surrounding months, the Journal's analysis shows. Glassdoor's problem echoes the challenged faced by other online rating platforms, who are trying to ensure their rankings are real and maintain users' trust. Amazon.com, local-business site Yelp and hotel-and-restaurant site TripAdvisor have all had to fend off attempts to game reviews and ratings.
What's the secret? (Score:4, Insightful)
So...what's the secret? I thought this was SOP in corporate America.
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They are being a progressive company with a positive HR policy. The old way would be yanking out your fingernails for a bad or mediocre review.
Let the beatings commence until moral improves.
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'Progressive' is just a political label.
It means: 'Reactionary that wants to return to the politics of the 1920s, is unaware of history between 1920 and now.'
They have to keep changing their label, as people figure out who they are and ignore them.
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Rather than good reviews for their own company, they could generate anonymous bad reviews for their competitors. That would still give them a comparative recruiting advantage, but would be much harder to track to its source.
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Rather than good reviews for their own company, they could generate anonymous bad reviews for their competitors. That would still give them a comparative recruiting advantage, but would be much harder to track to its source.
Stop giving bad people ideas on how to be more effectively evil.
Re:What's the secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Guaranteed Rate CEO Victor Ciardelli instructed his team to enlist employees likely to post positive reviews...these employees flooded Glassdoor with hundreds of five-star ratings So...what's the secret? I thought this was SOP in corporate America.
A former employer did that. They waited until employees hit their five-year mark (or thereabouts) and then suggested that, if they had not yet done so, they leave a Glassdoor review.
Their reasoning was that only employees that had a favorable opinion would stick around that long, and it couldn't hurt that they had just received milestone benefits (an extra week of annual vacation was awarded at five years).
But anybody who is really looking on Glassdoor should know that you want to take a sample of different reviews, with tenure being the primary factor in how you evaluate a review. The sales rep who has been there fifteen years is probably doing really well and gets special treatment. The intern that only lasted two weeks might have screwed it up for himself.
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As a counterpoint, if you are working for a company longer, you are not a whiny job hopper, who leaves a job, because you have to do work that you just don't like to do.
"Management was a nightmare. I got penalized because I never checked in my work to source control!" "I am a programmer, it isn't my job to help plug in and setup a printer"
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As a counterpoint, if you are working for a company longer, you are not a whiny job hopper, who leaves a job, because you have to do work that you just don't like to do.
"Management was a nightmare. I got penalized because I never checked in my work to source control!" "I am a programmer, it isn't my job to help plug in and setup a printer"
Agreed. I value the positive reviews the most that have between 1-3 year tenure and the negative reviews the most that are 3+ years tenure.
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omg you are clueless and clearly a programmer, your hypothetical goes in the wrong direction: as a programmer, it is NOT your job to help plug in and set up a printer, and the hard part as an employer is getting programmers to stop doing shit like that. You are paid far too much for that, AND you're going to deliver your own project late as it is, so please remained focused on your job, and leave printer setup to the people whose job that is, they'll figure it out.
I wish sharing someone's comment from slashdot has the same level of perceived oomph as from Twitter or memes or something. Unfortunately, no. I love this reply though. I actually have to do this at my current job (first time in about 2 decades) because our department/company is so small. It works out better in the end to teach the non-programmers how to fix printer issues if there's no I.T. department.
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To be fair... people are far more likely to go online to complain about a company than they are to go online to praise. If a lot of people have been with an employer for a long time and are happy about it, they should definitely be encouraged to post about it.
My last employer laid off a large portion of their IT staff and filed for bankruptcy. Lots of talent and corporate knowledge was lost. No matter how many happy people post, you can't cover something like that up.
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The thing is we know that satisfied people are far less likely to go online and make a bunch of good reviews, someone who is angry, feels mistreated, disrespected, or cheated will post bad reviews all over the place, post it on facebook, and scream as loud as they can.
Anytime I see something with a boatload of good reviews I'm suspicious.
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But anybody who is really looking on Glassdoor should know that you want to take a sample of different reviews, with tenure being the primary factor in how you evaluate a review.
Anyone looking at online reviews needs to realise that they should be taken with a huge grain of salt. These systems have been openly gamed for years and are inherently untrustworthy.
Glassdoor is kind of redundant, it's not a reliable source of information and you'll get a better idea about the company by asking questions in the interview. Interviewers will give huge clues to the corporate culture, especially if they're non HR types, asking open-ended questions like "what do you like most about working h
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We had a disgruntled ex employee leave a lot of bad reviews on Glassdoor for us. It was easy to tell that most of the bad reviews were not legit because there were more bad reviews than employees that recently left. Glassdoor would not investigate because we could not say which ones were fraudulent (they were willing to assume multiple reviews by the same employee were fraudulent).
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Just out of curiosity, why do you assume that it was one employee and many bad reviews?
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Just out of curiosity, why do you assume that it was one employee and many bad reviews?
Given a paragraph written by one of my co-workers, I can usually guess who wrote it. People tend to have patterns in their writing structures, have idiosyncratic choices in words and phrases, and even have patterns in their grammatical errors.
Your writing is like a fingerprint. That is how they caught the Unabomber [wikipedia.org].
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/sarcasm What? Companies buy off negative reviews? I'm shocked, shocked to discover this! Corporations are a bastion of ethics and upstanding persons! *snicker*
On a more serious note:
Just in case foreign readers were wondering what SOP stood for:
SOP = Standard Operating Procedure.
Futile... (Score:2)
Re:Futile... (Score:4)
Right. This doesn't sound like gaming the system to me. This sounds like encouraging people with positive experiences to write a review. Because generally people are moved to write reviews out of anger.
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Right. This doesn't sound like gaming the system to me. This sounds like encouraging people with positive experiences to write a review. Because generally people are moved to write reviews out of anger.
Is it "encouragement" (nods and smiles) or "encouragement" (frowns and shakes head)?
So your boss sticks his head in and asks "Laz, would you be a good chap and write us a good review on that employment review site" it followed with a spoken or unspoken "and this will be remembered at your next performance review".
Because you can get away with that even in Australia and the UK with it's strong worker protection, you cant really count on any review not to be written under duress.
Re:Futile... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Does anyone ever read the positive reviews? I know when I am looking into a company on glassdoor, I just skip to the reviews describing the problems people have had.
I try to be thorough too if possible. Another problem though is that the "at a glance" or overall rating gets boosted by gaming the system.
Not hard to do... (Score:2)
This doesn't seem hard to do. Create throwaway accounts, make some inane comments, click 5 stars, repeat.
It would be nice if Glassdoor would do some vetting... even if it just asking for a SMS number and making sure it belongs to a cellular network (so Google Voice or burnerapp.com could be factored out.) Combine that with some active bannification of offenders.
Re:Not hard to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we get away from using SMS for anything. I'm tired of companies trying to link to one of the more persistent offline identifiers I have. No, I'm creating an account with a throwaway for a reason.
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Then you won't get me, because I don't have a phone contract with anyone. Businesses that demand I carry a tracking device in my pocket -- and pay for the privilege -- can go fuck their hats.
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It would be nice if Glassdoor would do some vetting..
The problem is, the only entity with money (and who is willing to pay) is the business.
The full article (Score:2)
ANDREA FULLER JANUARY 22, 2019
Last summer, employees of Guaranteed Rate Inc. posted a stream of negative reviews about the mortgage broker on Glassdoor, a company-ratings website.
“An American sweatshop,” read a one-star review in June. “Worst company I ever worked for,” read another in July. The company’s rating on Glassdoor, which is determined by employee feedback, fell to 2.6 sta
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How do you know they were disgruntled and how do you know the CEO 'asked'?
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It's an assumption either way. People can change their mind too. Nobody knows anything for sure.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't even fraudulent or anything, just massaging.
Any system that is both (1) incentivized (2) imbalanced will be gamed. Typically this happens when some bean counter (of any variety, term used loosely) assumes rough metric X equates to complicated reality Y. But who wants to deal with complicated right? Gimmie a single oversimplified number, a unified theory of everything.
Anyway, our hardon for ratings has led to a whole menagerie of manipulators, of varying cost, efficacy, morality, and legality. Why does this one have such a shocked pikachu?
Call me when the ratings are fake, or at least bought. I'm not being very unseated by "omg beloved and trusted and ACCURATE (lol) glassdoor is being tilted"
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in life, I like to try to balance such things.
For example, if I really like the company and they ask me to write a positive review, I will.
If I disliked the company, I'd also write a positive review with some odd grammar, and then write two negative ones with throwaway accounts.
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You must be new to life. Nobody posts an unbiased opinion when forced into it. People are forced into things all the time.
For example, my company once offered us optional "e pay stubs". I liked tracking my pay with a hardcopy that I reviewed every few months for errors, and that had a copy they couldn't modify or delete. So I didn't "Opt in".
Next, my manager asks me why I'm not using it. I told him why, he walked off.
a few months later, he comes by and tells me that he will have to justify every employee no
Paying for Reviews is Common, People (Score:4, Interesting)
My prior company, which I am not allowed to name because of my very lucrative separation agreement with them, actually paid hourly factory employees for good reviews on Glassdoor. They even rolled out the program in early November so that the bonuses would be paid in time for holiday shopping. They started at $100 and increased the bonus to $200 at some point before finally turning it off.
It worked though - they got almost 100 new 5 star reviews out of it, and increased their Glassdoor rating significantly.
Many other local manufacturing companies here do the same thing, and one that I am aware of that makes car parts even makes writing a good review part of their on-boarding process.
Crazy stuff.
99.44% of what you see on the Internet is bullshit.
Just remove them (Score:3)
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Seriously ... they're just using an arithmetic mean? Did all the maths folk quit working at Glassdoor?
What's the value of glassdoor anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The salary data is organized by job title rather than field, which means that it's worthless since you can't map the titles from one employer to another.
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The takeaway is that ... (Score:2)
... online reviews are as accurate as online polls.
Well, another important takeaway is that users should, by now, be too sophisticated to pay attention to either.
Stars are arbitrary anyway (Score:2)
What each number of stars means is different for everyone, and can even change over time for the same person. Further, the distribution is not linear.
Instead of assigning a star rating, a person should be required to choose another company to compare this one against, then rate this one higher or lower than the other company. Then the software would use the Condorcet Method to rank all companies from best to worst and assign each one a percentile ranking. The middle-of-the-pack company would receive a 50%,
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Also: https://www.xkcd.com/1098/ [xkcd.com]
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Just goes to show you... (Score:2)
Many of these online reviews are nothing more than astroturfing. I take them all with a huge grain of salt. If you get a job offer from a company and really want to know what it's like there then the only way to know for sure is to ask someone you know that works there.
But even then, if they referred you then they stand to make a bonus. So they might be inclined to bend the truth a bit just to pocket a little extra cash.
Maybe the only way to combat this is to post not just raw numbers but voting trends. If
Seems Everyone Does This (Score:2)
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"I was ordered by the CEO to leave this review on pain of termination of employment. Five stars!"
That's how I would handle it.
Idiots! (Score:2)
"Ok, boss, will do!"
I'm shocked! Shocked I say! (Score:1)
Boss says. "I'm shocked to find out companies are manipulating their ratings like this... I won't stand for this unethical behavior at THIS company!"
Employee walks by, "I put in that positive review like you asked boss, who do I ask in HR to get the gift card?"
It's always been sports coverage (Score:2)
It's very easy to mitigate this gaming effect. Such a site could easily normalize the scores based on the frequency of the influx. So let's say only counting the first hundred positive reviews of the month. A simple cap.
Of course, then you'd do the same with the negative reviews, limiting their effect as well.
And that, again, is where you've shot your own foot.
This is the reason that all of these completely fraudulent reputation sites are, at their very core, and from the ground up, completely fraudulent
Read only negative reviews for everything (Score:2)
... see if they have any merit, and count them. And then just maybe compare them to overall number or reviews.
Been here. (Score:1)
My company did the same (Score:2)
My company did the same thing, asking employees (including contractors lol) to post positive reviews so they could attract better job candidates.
I gave an honest review (which was mostly good).
The bottom line is that I'm not going to sing the praises of a place that is genuinely bad or unpleasant to work at. If they sucked I'd say so in no uncertain terms.
Separation agreements (Score:1)
Another thing that employers exploit are separation agreements between employees that are fired/quit and the employer to block them from making negative comments about the employer.
It was a good run (Score:2)
About 20 years ago, Google demonstrated to (a shocked community) that the opinions of a large population can be aggregated to achieve some form of collective intelligence. This observation transformed the world, gave us innovative products like Waze, and eventually led to the rise of the Big Data industry.
Now, we have seen how the system is hacked, infiltrated, censored, manipulated, to fit some narrative. Reflecting on 20 years of awe, I am grateful that it held out that long.
Should have an expiry date for old reviews (Score:2)
Glassdoor (and other sites that review businesses) really should have an expiry date - say 5 years - for old reviews.
This is because over rhe longer term, management, employees and offices all change enough to invalidate almost all old
reviews. I've seen 10-year-old reviews on there where management has completely changed, 90% of staff have been replaced and offices moved multiple times and yet the only review available is the hugely out-of-date one thay doesn't reflect the current company at all.
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Nah, don't remove them. Just set the default on the sorting options to only look back X years. If someone wants to go back further, they can.
Read the opinions (Score:1)