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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.
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.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
It also helps to look at reviews "in the middle". Sometimes the 1 star reviews are just people with some grudge because they got fired, or people who are overly critical and don't know that the world isn't perfect. This goes for Amazon reviews too. Some of the 1 star reviews are from people who received a box with torn packaging, or got the package later than they expected to, and give a 1 star to the product itself. Completely dumb.
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.
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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"