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How Companies Secretly Boost Their Glassdoor Ratings (wsj.com)
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees
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 stars out of 5.
Concerned...
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 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. Some companies, including Elon Musk’s rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and software giant SAP SE , have had multiple spikes.
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 Inc., local-business site Yelp Inc. and hotel-and-restaurant site TripAdvisor Inc. have all had to fend off attempts to game reviews and ratings.
Glassdoor’s company ratings are a powerful weapon in job recruiting, giving companies an incentive to inflate them. Sought-after workers—the site gets about 60 million users per month, according to web-research firm SimilarWeb—read reviews to help determine where they want to work.
“Glassdoor is the most dominant company reviews website by far,” said Andy Challenger, vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. He said low ratings can discourage applicants, “particularly at a time like right now, with unemployment at historically low levels when companies are fighting to retain and attract good people.”
In the Journal’s analysis, five-star ratings collectively made up 45% of reviews in the months where the number of reviews jumped, compared with 25% in the six months before and after. While it isn’t possible to determine from the data alone what caused each spike, a statistical test shows the likelihood that so many would skew positive by chance is highly improbable.
Well-known names with large spikes included messaging-app developer Slack Technologies Inc., professional-networking site LinkedIn, health insurer Anthem Inc., household-products maker Clorox Co. and Jack Daniel’s maker Brown-Forman Corp.
Spokespeople for Slack, LinkedIn and Anthem said their companies have encouraged employees to give feedback. A Brown-Forman spokeswoman said it doesn’t have a formal strategy to solicit reviews. Clorox didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In some cases,
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.
They could identify and remove these coerced review waves with the most basic statistical outlier analysis. It would be rather hard to organize a campaign to defeat this, i.e. you'd have to slowly ramp up the number of positive reviews over months to avoid sounding the alarm. Any review-centric site should be doing this as table stakes for upholding their reputation.
I have yet to work for an employer where the glassdoor rating meant much in comparison to my own experience with said employer. Really large employers are generally so fragmented that the only way to really evaluate them is in parts (particularly in finding the part that matters for your own work) and seeing how employees there view it. Smaller employers won't get many glassdoor reviews because the employees would be identified too easily. This leaves medium sized employers? Yeah, when they're hiring for my line of work I might look at glassdoor for them again - though I trust my direct sources more than anonymous glassdoor users anyways.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
... 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.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
How do you know they were disgruntled and how do you know the CEO 'asked'?
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%, the very best a 99%, and the very worst a 1%.
Yes, it means someone who has worked at the same company their entire life would not be able to rate their company due to having none other to compare it against, but I see that as a feature and not a flaw.
Let's ditch the star rating system and demand something better!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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 reviews have gone way up or way down recently that should be a red flag.
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"
Worked for a company where the CEO would ask new hires to leave a positive review just a week in. Of course by that point you have little to base your experience on and when the CEO asks you and is watching, of course you'll leave a positive review. He also asked everyone to email and submit them for a "Best Workplace" award. Again, at a small company where the CEO's office is just down the hall, most felt intimidated and required to do so. It was much more of an order than anything.
"Hey guys, we need to you all post glowing reviews to make it easier for us to hire people to replace you at lower pay!"
"Ok, boss, will do!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If you google a company you are thinking of working for, chances are reviews of it will show up on glassdoor.com -- meaning if you've never heard of it, either you've never changed jobs or you changed jobs without doing your homework!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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?"
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Would you want such a site to ignore a thousand negative reviews just because they came in all at once? But you want them to ignore the positive reviews?
It's easy to game any system that doesn't verify anything. And none of these reputation sites put any work into actually verifying that the review content is accurate. And that makes them completely meaningless.
Hire me. I have great references. They aren't related to me at all. I haven't paid them a dime. They aren't being paid to help me.
Reviews are valueless unless you know the reviewer. It's that simple.
... see if they have any merit, and count them. And then just maybe compare them to overall number or reviews.
It's an assumption either way. People can change their mind too. Nobody knows anything for sure.
A company I used to work for was horrible. Cut pay when they took the contract even though we didn't have any increase in 5 years. We had a massive turnover because of new management that was brought in. On top of this, I was told to monitor specific employees' network connections to see how much they used social media when it wasn't approved by HR.... Regardless, it was a mess. The place started off with 2 stars on glass door, and they quickly solved that by posting up fake reviews after each person who left, entered a bad review. Magically, though the company is still shit, they're up to 4 stars. For reference, that company was called Navarro, inc.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
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.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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 not using the system. As if I'm going to put myself on his bad side, so I "Opted in".
the next company newsletter was full of praise for how quickly everyone decided to use the system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just read what people write and don't take the rating so seriously. It is very subjective - you can work in company ABC with a good team on a good project, but someone else might have landed in a bad team, working on a boring project. I'd rather go to meetups and ask people around.