Archive for August, 2008

Over the past week we’ve seen incredible interest from users outside of the United States, with more than 40% of this week’s site traffic coming from our international users.  This response and all the feedback we have received from across the world has been overwhelmingly positive, so we wanted to say thanks – merci – danke – and much more to everyone for helping us make Glassdoor more relevant to all users, regardless of where you work.

It has become clear to us that workers everywhere are curious about what it’s really like on the inside and what it means to be fairly paid. And although discussion of salaries in many countries is considered a taboo subject, it seems like Glassdoor’s anonymous set-up might be just the thing to open up the exchange of information about jobs and the workplace.

As of today the top 10 countries represented in the Glassdoor community are:

United States
Canada
United Kingdom
India
Australia
France
Germany
Ireland
China
Japan

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… and we’re doing it with a few other salary improvements that members have been asking for since our launch in June. Now on Glassdoor you can see salary and total pay for any job at a company on one page, and more importantly you can filter by experience and location (with salaries shown in local currency for that location – see below).

This wasn’t as easy as you might think. People get paid in more ways than you can imagine and it gets even more complicated when you throw in local currencies and workplace conventions for more than 100 countries. Thankfully we were able to find a simple solution that addressed a few issues, and in doing so we have set the course for much broader international support.

There’s a lot more work to do and we’re still a ways from offering versions in local languages, but with this move we’ve made a commitment to deliver on the universal appeal of workplace transparency. Thanks to all the non-US community members for their patience, feedback and support as we work through some of our growing pains.

Trust us, we get that work matters no matter where you live – ...

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I don’t think anyone likes to move.  Packing, unpacking, getting everything set-up just right – it takes forever, and it can be back-breaking work.  But when an office upstairs opened up, I didn’t take much to sell us that it was going to be worth the move.  We were in a relatively small, dark office space with no kitchen (that’s right – we had a bucket instead) – and this new space not only has a kitchen, it is a wide open space with a wall of windows, views of Mt. Tamalpais, and most importantly a deck (with two sliding “glassdoors”).  So as much as I hate moving, I was ready!

What I should say is that I was ready to be in a new office – I’m not sure I was ready for the moving part.  I think Yahoo! might have spoiled me a bit – when I worked there an office move meant throwing your stuff into a few boxes, labeling some equipment, and getting out of the way.  But when you’re at a scrappy start-up you don’t have Office Movers on speed dial.  So we did it ourselves, ...

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I’ve seen a lot of interest from students who want to check out our reviews and salaries – and why wouldn’t you?!   If you’re a student, our “employee generated content” offers you an inside look at some of the largest, most reputable companies in the world – and we’ll cover just about every company you could ever imagine coming to campus.  And most importantly, all this information is available on a student budget (in other words, it’s all free!).

We always knew that Glassdoor would be an invaluable resource for students, so when I read this blog post about college grads settling into their first job – it really hit home just how useful we could be.  The post encourages all you recent college grads to take cues from your co-workers and ask questions of your managers – all great advice.  But wouldn’t it be better to take some of these cues and get some of those questions answered before you’ve even started?  Which is exactly why we’re here.  Think of it – your potential co-workers and managers are already talking on Glassdoor, and they’re giving you more than enough information not just to fit ...

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Work matters – from our compensation that controls our personal finances to our job satisfaction that can ultimately affect our mental and physical health or even non-work relationships. We’ve always known that our work was an important part of our lives (that’s why we launched Glassdoor.com), but a recent article in the Indianapolis Star got us thinking about how to become more aware of the options we have when things at work don’t always seem to work out.

Using research recently conducted by Harris Interactive, we pulled a few insights into common workplace “spillover effects” and how we hope to help you avoid them.

1. Salary Sharing Phobia
In some parts of the world, “how much do you make?” is as common as “where do you live?” or “what do you do?” In the U.S., however, salary phobia is so common in company cultures that it makes it difficult (if not impossible) to find out whether you’re being fairly compensated. From our research, about one in ten (11%) employed adults say they are not comfortable discussing their compensation with anyone and fewer than one in four are comfortable talking about compensation with co-workers. It seems we are clearly more ...

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