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.
So why is it so hard to find good information on the culture at companies? I mean seriously, Google serves up 15,400,000 sites with reviews for the iPhone – yet I can’t find a good site that can tell me what it’s really like to work for Apple. We have more information on the gadgets in our life than we do on the activity that consumes most of our life.
And when it comes to salary, it’s notoriously difficult to get good information. The best I’ve ever found is talking to friends, but that’s a small sample set, not to mention weird, especially as you get more senior.
I’ve been both an employee and an employer for many years, from an entry-level engineer to president of Hotwire.com – and now CEO of Glassdoor.com — and what I’ve found is that people just want to know that they are being paid fairly. They understand that different jobs, and different performance in those jobs, warrant different pay scales They just want to know they’re getting a fair shake for the work they do. More transparency in this arena holds us all to a higher standard that will ultimately elevate our conversations about compensation and our work environments. We know this in our gut and we know this from research. Nearly 60 percent of employed adults say they wished they had more information about fair market compensation for their position in their company and local market.
So, we’ve built Glassdoor to help open up some of these closed areas and share this information, but we can’t do this alone. We need your help. If you are currently employed or have had a job within the last three years, tell us your story (anonymously of course). Fill out a review or a salary survey and invite your friends. Only by working together can we affect a cultural mind shift that it’s okay to open the doors wide open on compensation and culture and let people peek inside a company – or even the next cubicle.
And, if you’re an employer, we hope you’ll stay and participate because Glassdoor can be a helpful resource to you, and we want your company to have a seat at the table in our community. We invite you to join our panel by sending mail to employeradvisors@glassdoor.com.
We’re just getting started here so we hope you’ll check back and give us your feedback along the way. The more information we collect, the more ways we can present data, and that’s when the fun really starts. To get an idea for some of the uses we think are interesting, check out a few illustrative charts and graphics we created, like how Yang and Ballmer stack up in CEO Ratings. (admittedly these are off relatively small sample sizes – as Glassdoor grows, this data will only get better)
There is a whole new world of information out there, and with your help we’re about to uncover even more…
Welcome to Glassdoor.
