Glassdoor’s vision has always been to bring radical transparency to workplaces everywhere. Transparency helps people make better, informed, decisions. More importantly, transparency is a force for good that drives accountability. In 2008, Glassdoor hit the world by storm by allowing employees to do something that was initially considered taboo. We allowed employees to leave company reviews, rate their CEOs, and share salary information anonymously and publicly — all with the intent of helping people make more informed decisions about where to work. This level of transparency had never been seen before. Glassdoor was, and continues to be, the worldwide leader on insights about jobs and companies. Our reviews and ratings disrupted how millions of people found jobs and researched companies, and we’re extremely proud of that progress.
The workplace has evolved, and we must evolve with it.
At the same time, workplace culture has rapidly evolved. Between the pandemic, “The Great Resignation,” and ongoing economic uncertainty, the workforce does not look like it did just a few years ago, and it probably never will again. We’ve settled into a different way of working that is more geographically distributed, and workers are craving ways to keep connected when they’re not physically together. Additionally, Glassdoor reviews within almost any industry are now commonplace, from travel to real estate to retail and more. Employers and businesses expect to be rated.
We’ve reached an inflection point where we see an opportunity to go above and beyond ratings and reviews to serve the needs of job seekers, employees and employers, and we are evolving to define a new frontier of radical transparency.
Reimagining Glassdoor as the leading community for workplace conversations
In September 2021, we acquired Fishbowl, a fast-growing platform where millions of professionals engage in candid workplace conversations. For Glassdoor, Fishbowl is an important key to unlocking real-time *dialogue* between job seekers, employees and employers - a way for them to ask questions and share knowledge and opinions with one another. And unlike the way reviews and ratings work today, this will allow for real-time conversations, to go deeper on any workplace topic and get multiple, diverse points of view.
There’s immense value for Glassdoor users by leaning into Fishbowl’s focus on community and workplace conversations:
- For job seekers, they’ll be able to go deeper than anonymous reviews by asking specific questions, seeking professional advice or drilling into areas of concern about a company or job.
- For employees, they’ll be able to express deeper perspectives about their companies and jobs. And furthermore, as the workplace is increasingly distributed, employees will have greater opportunities to connect with their colleagues or casually network with those outside their organization.
- For employers, they’ll be able to glean deeper insights on their employees' actual feedback and experiences. With these community insights, they’ll be able to effectively engage their employees to help boost productivity and retain top talent.
We have been hard at work starting to integrate many of these Fishbowl community features into our product, and we recently reached a milestone where we have updated our Glassdoor app in the U.S. to be centered around workplace conversations. In the coming months, we are excited to unveil even more updates on our transformation to becoming the leading community for workplace conversations, and we hope you will join us on this journey.
Our experience leveraging Fishbowl with our own team this past year has been extremely impactful - we’ve seen firsthand the value our employees get out of it every day - getting their questions answered and their voices heard. And from the perspective of a leader at Glassdoor, I’ll admit it can be tough at times, but that is by design. While we expect employees and job seekers will love this reimagined Glassdoor — we also anticipate it’s something that employers will likely be a bit nervous about. We’re okay with that, because pushing for a deeper level of transparency may be uncomfortable at first, but ultimately, it’s good for everyone. And just like in 2008, Glassdoor will lead disruption with a purpose.