We started Glassdoor in 2007 with the mission to help people everywhere find a job and company they love.
Back then, the world had given us Yelp to find restaurants and TripAdvisor to find hotels. But people were making one of the most important decisions of their entire life—where to go to work—with almost no information.
Our mission
There was plenty of information online about what jobs were available, but there was almost nothing about the culture of a company, or how much they paid, or how their interview process worked. So we asked ourselves: “How can we distill and assemble all that information in a constructive and fair way?”
And we knew that by finding a way, we could remove some of the opaqueness in the hiring transaction, helping people make better decisions about where to go to work.
The cost of a bad hire
When there’s a good match, and a person ends up at a company that’s a good fit, everyone benefits. On the other hand, a bad employment experience can be devastating, affecting not only a worker’s morale and health but also relationships with friends and family. It hurts employers too, killing productivity and growth as well as putting friction on the company as a whole.
In fact, our friends at SHRM put the cost of a hiring mistake at two to three times the annual salary of an employee. At Glassdoor, we honestly believe that if we help people make better decisions about where to work that we’ll add to the overall GDP of the United States.
Content moderation
Of course, making sure the right people end up at the right company isn’t easy. It’s not a review of a restaurant or a hotel under consideration; it’s a review of a company, its mission, its people, its management, even its culture.
As you might expect, all this can be very emotional. That’s why we take the stewardship of our user-generated content (reviews, ratings, salary information) very seriously. We’ve put enormous research, time and effort into defining what belongs in our community. We pre-moderate everything before it goes live on Glassdoor making sure it fits our community guidelines.
Responding to reviews and content
We’re constantly asking ourselves, “Are we doing all the right things? Will this content help a job seeker find the right company for them?” Meanwhile, to be fair to employers, we counter balance our user-generated content by offering a Free Employer Account which gives employers the ability to flag content for further review if they think something is wrong, or respond to reviews.
Using that Free Employer account, Glassdoor clients and employers, for example, can publicly acknowledge someone who leaves a positive review about their culture. Or, vice versa, if an official company representative sees something not quite right, they can respond, therefore setting the record straight. In some cases, employees will leave comments about older or outdated issues. The company can reply by acknowledging the specific issue and noting changes, updates or resolutions.
The power of engagement
It’s extremely powerful when companies and executive teams engage in the Glassdoor community. In a survey of Glassdoor users (Glassdoor Member Survey, October 2014), 69% agree their perception of a company improves after seeing an employer respond to a review.
We believe this synergy of user-generated content and employer-generated content really can help people find the jobs and companies they love. In the end, it’s good for employees, it’s good for companies, and it’s good for the economy as a whole.
