This article kind of misses the entire point; Glassdoor and the rest of these "professional review" sites sell reputation management services to the company. They use the negative reviews to push other high margin services to the companies. The only one who should care about Glassdoor being gamed is Glassdoor executives; anyone looking for a honest and balanced review of a company workplace on Glassdoor is already getting a manufactured picture.
It's the same business model as the Better Business Bureau and Yelp. It's a manufactured perspective.
As a devil's advocate, how can a company expect to be viewed impartially if the only folks who review them have tempers raged enough to motivate them to leave a poor review in the first place? How can I, a potential employee, trust said-reviewer wasn't let go due to Silo'd mismanagement, personal issues or a company pivoting?
I'd rather a platform that lays out exactly what the working conditions would be for most folks. Time in/out of office, salary merit increases or profit-sharing, draconian work-attire policy, etc.
They don't check if you actually worked for the place reviewed. You can leave a review for any company to gain access. Sorry GameStop, for my neutral review even though I never worked there.
Or reviews are written mostly by people who had a bad experience yelp or glassdoor - same thing. Look at a few profiles. They have nothing but negative reviews.
Their Legal Action section sounds vaguely threatening.
> Also, if we feel strongly that your lawsuit is primarily intended to chill free speech, we may take extra steps to let the world know what you are up to.
If you're a cellular company, "may" means "will". "If you are in the higher tiers of data use, we may throttle your bandwidth".
If you're Glassdoor who sells reputation management and HR services to the very employers being reviewed, "may" means "we're paying lip service to our critics".
May throttle doesn't necessarily mean "will throttle." The company is giving itself the latitude not to throttle, or to not throttle exactly at the data cap.
In other words, you can't rely on that throttling if you're, say, connecting to some cloud service that's charging you by the gigabyte to transfer data.
No, it doesn't, canonically. But it equally can. Witness Verizon, throttling first responders in California wildfires. At 3.45am. Despite their verbiage about usage limits, above which "may be throttled depending on network capacity", it was obvious that after limit+1 bit, regardless of network capacity, you would be throttled, no ifs, buts or may(be)s.
> Ask Your Employees to Leave More of Them. We encourage you to ask your employees to leave honest reviews on Glassdoor.
I personally see this as manipulating and watering down. It's not an ethical problem IMHO, but I'd rather hear from the people that were motivated enough by their love or hate to go out and leave a review. Also as an employee, I've had an employer ask me to leave an honest review, and there is no question in my mind what they really meant :-)
