Archive for June, 2008

People Want More!

According to a recent USA Today poll, 94% of readers said they would use Glassdoor.com to post anonymous company ratings and reviews.  Our own research reveals a similar finding – people want more information about compensation and company information – and that’s the whole reason we built Glassdoor.

USA Today Survey

More convincing than research or polls, though, has been the overwhelming response we have received since our beta launch. As of this morning, we are approaching 50,000 company reviews and salary reports for more than 11,000 companies!! We’re already bringing more transparency to the workplace and folks are starting to get a sense of just how powerful this information is. In a recent blog post Oren Hurvitz examined if it would affect Apple’s bottom line if they increased the salary of its engineers, which appear to make less than their counterparts at other leading tech firms.  It’s a fascinating analysis. Condé Nast Portfolio reporter Kevin Maney laments Motorola and spotlights input from employees who joined the Glassdoor community as a key indicator of the company’s woes.  And, U.S. News and World Report’s Liz Wolgemuth offers workers some great tips on what to do now that ...

Read more »

First “Review of the Month” winner

Last week, shortly after we launched, I had the pleasure of notifying one of our new members that his review had been selected as our first “Review of the Month” – an honor that also came with $500.  You may have seen a note about this award while posting your review, but I think it’s worth mentioning again – both the review and the award.   Every month we are selecting one review for overall quality and thoughtfulness, and for being everything we want Glassdoor to be.  That review wins a place in our history as “Review of the Month” and the user wins $500 to go celebrate.

Our first winning review comes from an employee at Netflix.  What got me about this reviewer was that he had taken the time to offer other users insight that you could only get from being on the inside.  He had distilled his experiences, both positive and negative, into a few paragraphs that really gave an amazing peek inside of Netflix.   Where was this information before?

I personally learned two things from this review – first, that Netflix is a hard-driving, type-A environment.  The reviewer sums it up:

Read more »

Keep it comin’….

Growth has been phenomenal – when we launched, we had coverage on 250 companies with about 3,300 reviews.

As of this morning, we have:

32,000 reviews…
Covering 6,679 companies…
Representing 84 countries around the world…
With people in more than 165 countries visiting glassdoor.com

When we launched, we made a commitment to inspect every single review by hand – and we’re doing exactly that.  In fact, we’ve found that we’re rejecting 1 or 2 out of every 10 reviews because they violate our community guidelines in some way, are clearly bogus, or are someone trying to post duplicates, etc.

As we had hoped, the community is helping us to keep content accurate.  We accidentally let an intern’s salary flow into Apple’s fulltime salary chart, and someone caught it and emailed us in under 3 minutes!  Needless to say we fixed it in the next 60 seconds.  If you see something suspicious, don’t hesitate to flag it to us at content@glassdoor.com and we will investigate.  (and we will have easier flagging tools in the near future on the site)

If you’ve posted a review and haven’t seen it on the site, know that we are working furiously to get content approved.  To be honest, we’re a bit buried under this ...

Read more »

What a first day…

What a day! We all remember the first day of a new job and at Glassdoor, we’ll certainly never forget our first day.  It’s been a busy one and I know many visitors had some slow first encounters with the site as we adapted to public life, but I think we’ve got it under control now.  (Although we are still behind sending registration validation emails because of a mail server glitch, which has been fixed - if you haven’t gotten yours, or got more than one, we really apologize - we will be caught up shortly.)p>

In just a matter of hours today, we collected more than 10,000 new reviews, and they continue to come in rapidly.  If you haven’t seen your anonymous review or salary details post to the site yet, don’t worry - we’re still making our way through the backlog and you’ll likely see the information uploaded soon.

Since we came out of the gate at 8:45 p.m. PDT June 10, 2008, we’ve had

more than 1,200,000 page views
more than 10,000 new salary reports and reviews…we’re rapidly approaching 15,000, or about 5x where we started
3,000 new companies received first content…bringing the total companies with data to more than 3,250…. and growing and growing
...

Read more »

Wow!

Thanks to everyone for the interest in our site and your feedback. We have had a tremendous amount of web traffic, and received more than 600,000 page views before noon!

We are experiencing some hiccups and we are working fast and furiously to iron them out.

In just a few hours this morning, with your help, we have more than doubled our salary and review content, and they will be posted live over the next 48 hours as we review content.

Thanks so much for your patience as we work through these growing pains. Email us at info@glassdoor.com with any questions.

Read more »

Welcome to glassdoor.com

After months of speculation that we were building yet another travel service, we’re excited to open the doors to Glassdoor.com and show everyone what we’ve been up to (read our press release).  While we are staying with the idea that transparent access to information is good for everyone, most of us have already done travel and we think we’ve found another category in need of change.

Glassdoor gives you an inside look at companies from those that know them best – employees. You can see company ratings, reviews, and salaries – all for free.

We built Glassdoor for a very simple reason – because we believe that work matters.

At our core, everyone craves meaningful work.  We want to know that all of our blood, sweat, and tears matter.  We want to know that all of those hours away from our family aren’t for nothing.  We want – we need – to believe that we are serving a higher purpose, and that the world is better off because of our work.

Read more »