If anybody doesn't think this is a problem, I overheard managers talking about a 3rd-party tool that finds "at risk employees" which they didn't define but said it included signals such as "they updated their linked in recently" as a signal that they may be on the job hunt.
You better believe that data brokers are both interested in buying and selling any sort of information around your employment/job/interview behaviors.
Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway? Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
Remember when Yelp did that? And yet, somehow not dead.
Yelp has no real alternative for vetting unfamiliar restaurants, at least not one which doesn’t have similar conflicts.
TripAdvisor? They charge for advertising/sponsored positioning, but it's free to claim your business and it allows you to respond to people but pretty sure not do 'moderation' like that.
TripAdvisor is good for everything outside of the US but I pretty much just use Google Maps now for restaurants in the US. I'll keep an eye out for who gets awards in my city as well.
I find this is generally region-specific, as what review sites are most commonly used will differ somewhat from region to region.
I have found it preferable to visit the restaurant in question, look around, read the menu, and decide based on those cues around me whether it's worth risking a meal there.
Yelp has become useless, and TripAdvisor is as bad if not worse. The reviews on Google Maps are wholly unreliable as well.
If you're in UK look at Harden's http://www.hardens.com/
Google Maps?
Yelp isn't dead but no one I know uses it anymore, specifically due to all the issues with reviews.
Yelp rating, photos and reviews come before the street address when you click on a place in Apple Maps. I have to scroll down to get the street address, somebody decided that is less important.
Bing gives Yelp similar priority for queries like "tacos near me", so all the Bing-serving alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo do the same thing.
I think Yelp only survives through its integration with Apple Maps. If Apple ever decides to build its own review feature I can’t imagine Yelp surviving.
Apple seems to be working on it. A lot of times when I press that POI icon, I get Trip Advisor reviews and not Yelp. Additionally, there is thumbs up/down UI in the Apple Maps app to rate a POI. An example would be Fairhaven Village Inn, Bellingham, WA: no Yelp droppings anywhere to be found.
Given the integration, I'd expect that Apple's decision to build their own would start with buying Yelp if for nothing more than the data Yelp already has.
I basically stopped reading Amazon and Yelp reviews. They do more harm then good. Now it's all about human-curated information. Find someone you trust - on social media, a new site, or a newsletter. Get the info from them.
Should I eat here? Should I buy this product? Etc.
With restaurants it's tricky - sometimes you just need to take a chance. There is some old-school magic in that.
Find someone you trust - on social media, a new site, or a newsletter. Get the info from them.
OMG please don't do this - it's more gamed/scammy than online reviews: people will routinely post sponsored content disguised as personal recommendations. The FTC occasionally cracks down on it (or sends warning labels) but it's still so ubiquitous.
And yet, somehow not dead.
I can't remember the last time I looked at yelp, pre-covid maybe?
How is this not fraud?
https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-ca...
You can't pay us to take down reviews and we apply the same content moderation rules to our clients that we use for everyone else.
oh but they're not paying to take down reviews
you're paying to "flag and report reviews for additional scrutiny"
their process then co-incidentally always seems to agree that those reported by paying customers are bogus
(same as paying for trustpilot)
I’m still filing the regulator complaint.
hopefully the sarcasm in my post was obvious
maybe not :)
It was! :)
I wonder if it could be considered securities fraud, in the Matt Levine sense of "Everything is Securities Fraud."
I certainly would take CEO approval rating and employee's reviews of overall job satisfaction into account when investing in a company. If you see very low reviews, you know the company is under-investing in employees and will likely need to increase spend on employee retention in the coming years, which is not reported in their current financial reports. Likewise, if you want to be cynical, a consistent 5 star company has some fat it could trim, which would increase it's investment value.
Perhaps we'll see a shareholder lawsuit following a mass employee resignation event which was arguably concealed by manipulating employee reviews.
I know of two multinational conglomerates (one Indian, the other Argentinian) that requires all newcomers to post a GlassDoor review and a LinkedIn post praising the company, the onboarding gifts, and such things. Both are absolute hell to work for unless you're upper management, according to acquaintances that have been there and climbed outside the bog of low-level positions.
It's not a lot, but it's weird it happened twice.
Globant?
Their interview raised a lot of red flags for me. I see they were raised for a reason.
Who needs glassdoor when you get red flags like that on your first day.
Many companies pay agencies to post fake positive reviews about them. This is especially common among companies who publish fake job vacancies.
Many companies just post fake positive reviews about themselves directly. Glassdoor reviews come from two places: aggrieved former employees and HR departments. The whole thing is garbage.
i wish everyone would adopt a mutation to the 5 star review, so that at a single glance a 3 star review would have coded with it whether it's a bathtub curve, or equal, distribution. like, if it's bathtub curve, change the middle star to a skull. but if it's even, leave it a star. how great would that be
I feel like this is technically some kind of FTC violation, even if it’s not broadly enforced.
All reviews are scammed. Phone a friend.
I have an idea. We could build a new, better review site. Sprinkle in some blockchain and AI...
Join the trust graph...
There’s something odd in the lifecycle of these sorts of sites. I wonder if it goes like this:
Review site starts out as community driven, connected people tend to get involved. This provides a filter for competent users.
Companies become aware of the site, start looking for ways to manipulate their score. Companies gain access to competent employee. It is bearable for a while.
The scores are manipulated to the point where the site no longer provides a good signal. Only out of the loop dummies still use it, and it becomes a negative filter.
From this point of view, community sites are more like a crop that gets harvested. It would be better for people if it didn’t happen, but the incentive for the company seems to be: be the first one to start consuming the site.
Oh, a mini-cycle could be: at first, the companies that start manipulating the reviews tend to be the more connected and on-the-ball ones, so users don’t mind as much, since the companies that are trying to exploit the rankings them are also filtered for competence.
I know for sure that Glassdoor has no problem with companies flooding their page with fake positive reviews. I worked for a shady company that did exactly that in the most blatant way possible. They consistenly posted short vapid 5 star reviews on a regular weekly schedule from the same IP. I tried reporting it to Glassdoor two different times and they could not have cared less.
I find it hilarious that all the money pumped into Glassdoor has created less useful information about companies than the Better Business Bureau.
Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
I can verify this was true at least a few years ago. My friend's company had some bad (but totally honest) reviews. They requested them to be removed. Denied. A few days later they received an email from Glassdoor, talking about some sort of premium plan. They signed up. The bad reviews disappeared a few days later.
My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.
Still somewhat shady.
it wasn’t always the case (or at least most people believed it wasn’t) and they exist for a long time – the suggestion I think is for the people like me, who wrote something there over 10 years ago and now their posts would possibly stop being anonymous.
Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
I very briefly worked at a toxic company that was aggressive about Glassdoor reviews. From what I heard, they couldn’t get them removed just by asking. They had to carefully examine the Glassdoor rules and find a reason that a review violated the rules.
They used the argument that reviews revealed confidential company information most of the time. It didn’t always work.
When I left, I used a throwaway email and coffee shop WiFi to leave a completely accurate, honest review. I carefully made sure to comply with every letter of Glassdoor’s rules.
My review is still up.
Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway?
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but all online aggregate reviews are a scam. There are countless ways to game them and with AI it's only going to get worse. At best, they're a weak signal of whether something is bad or good. And the bigger and more popular a review site, the worse the quality/reliability since the impact of manipulating reviews on a site with a huge audience is that much higher.
I just logged in for the first time in years to delete my account, and before letting me do anything they required me to add my full name and other employment info.
I got the same modal, but I opened up DevTools, deleted the modal and was able to then click into my account settings and delete my account.
Same, but instead of devtools I just found a longer URL in my history to get past it.
Was it possible to use a fake name?
It is
i did the same and was so, so infuriated by that.
My name is Joe Blow and my job is a Glassdoor Bankruptcy Advocate located in Antarctica.
Same. Thought I must not have been signed in and was getting pushed into a signup flow or something, so I cleared cookies and got the same behavior once I logged in.
Forcing you to give them your real name before allowing you to use the site when logged in is incredibly scummy behavior I hope they are punished richly for.
I'm now known as John Smith, student at Brookdale Community College with an associates degree, aspiring to be an "Assistant Dog Catcher" (yes, that was one of the options in their auto-complete field) in Lodi, CA.
There was no option to delete the account, but after clicking "Deactivate", it still said that my account was now deleted, so who knows.
Edit: And now I received 2 emails from them that my recent submissions (filling in that form?) violated community rules.
I haven't logged in in years and I don't think I did much back then. Given everything I've read here, I think it might be safer just to let my account lie.
This is very very illegal, depending on jurisdiction.
I think Glassdoor has the issue in that its not a growth business, but needs to be. You can't have a website like Glassdoor that is VC funded, owned by PE or publicly traded and not have it go to shit. The organic usage is people looking for new jobs, or posting about jobs they hate, or companies responding. A website that has <20 employees and is fine with being a $10M a year business living off of ad revenue could absolutely do this and be successful. A business seeking to double revenue can't.
It does sometimes feel like we're missing out on these "reasonable company with reasonable expectations" type businesses and funding and crashing a ton of companies that would otherwise maybe live on reasonably?
What is the line from The Social Network? "Its not cool to be a millionaire, its cool to be a billionaire" or something along those lines. I think a lot of people aren't happy with being just very wealthy I suppose.
There's even a stigma to being a "single digit millionaire"
This is the essential problem with any platform whose value consists of user-generated content. For example, Reddit doesn't have to hold an IPO to continue being Reddit, they don't have to paywall their API, and they don't have to make their website a global dark pattern to force engagement; they chose to sell stakes and play the growth game. Medium is another example, as is Quora, LinkedIn, and a hundred other tech companies that are essentially specialized takes on PhpBB forums.
Yep, it's so disappointing how many web projects provide solid value for many people, have a reasonable business model, but go to absolute shit and eventually fade to nothing chasing unsustainable returns. It's staggering how much better the web could be if the demand for exponential returns hadn't become so dominant on the business side.
Yeah, and the problem is that if you try to start a bootstrapped company to compete with Glassdoor without ever taking funding, you’ll be outspent on marketing by the companies that did take funding and you’ll go under. There’s a reason so many of these sites are VC funded even when it feels like they shouldn’t be. And VCs are often willing to fund things with a 1% chance of success, so even if multiple VC-backed companies in a market have failed, it won’t dissuade them from investing.
All this "my final determination" and "your other surprise account" nonsense could be rectified pretty quickly with a GDPR banhammer. I am increasingly of the opinion that personal info of any kind should be legally radioactive, and very high-risk for companies to hold onto or collect.
I agree. I am the author of a [very mild] social media app, that Serves an extremely tinfoil demographic.
The #1 posture is that if we don't actually need the information for the application to run, we don't take it.
I won't go into detail about how we do what we do, but we don't keep any data, other than the email the user chooses to send us (which can be a DEA or proxied one). We also never export that email outside the server. No marketing aggregations, no trend analysis, etc. The email stays inside the deployed server.
This stance has not made me popular with my coworkers, but it has made our app quite popular with end-users.
stances and postures sound like policies that are not written
Nah, it’s written. It’s an iOS app, and Apple requires a well-written policy.
Also, I have gotten used to doing things this way. I’ve been writing software for this particular demographic, for over 20 years.
Glassdoor is so gross sometimes with its requirements.
Levels.fyi has been really nice.
The problem Ive always had with levels, is that it seems much more focused on the "sales" groups - the non tech, but vital to business everything.
I've always disliked sales. especially when working on projects where a sales is so smarmy, because they get a huge pay - and I, implementing it all - get nothing.
This happened all over. but here is a story of why I cant stand sales:
I was tech designer for LDAC (lucas presidio campus)
So I built out the RFP for network and we were doing selections up at Big Rock Ranch (the only reason this is important is just how beautiful the space is, so it feels really open nice energy, relaxing)
We are doing vendor selection presentations (the vendors come show us why their solution is best match to RFP reqs)
The vendors were Cisco, Foundry, Force-10 (extreme backed out)
Cisco comes in and they're going through their presentation and we are getting through it - I am reviewing and seeing that it was rather weak, more "marketing"-ish reply to the RFP instead of a detailed response on the specs...
I am sitting across from the main cisco sales guy. (this is at the time the largest 10G network in the world as this is just as the 10G switches were made) - so at the time, its a big deal - like ~$80 million in core gear)
The sales guy is leaning back as if... don't worry Toots. Jimmy's got this sniffs coke" https://i.imgur.com/gPdQiW5.jpg
--
So I am going over the RFP with his team, and he interjects:
"I just want to assure you that Cisco has a world class media team - and I will personally be sure they go through this in depth and really create the right solution"
PIN DROPs
(I am the youngest in the room - but its my RFP/design)
"Excuse me. This is the RFP review. Youre presenting your solution here today. So are you to tell me, that you have a "world class media team" and they have not informed your response to this RFP? That the entire point of this meeting" i said a few more things that made this guy die inside.
This guys balls shot into his throat.
Those are the types of people I think of when I think of levels.
(this was also the meeting where the CIO of Lucas Arts demanding a date for "when can you provide me power over fiber" ((his logic was the design was for both power and fiber to desktop - and he was trying to flex on showing 'how can we reduce infra wiring costs' -- it was a truly different world back then, mostly))
I used to think similar to you, as an engineer I didn't see value in sales. Then I tried to sell something myself and I realized it is not easy. You hear no all day long it starts to get to you.
The best sales people I've seen are relationship builders. They understand their clients needs (Even if outside the core market) and try to find a solution for their needs. This looks like wining/dining on the outside but it's important.
I would suggestion anyone that wants to build something to try and sell first. Then you'll realize why they get paid and can be very valuable.
(sorry that was from an old lens... I was pointing out my perception of LEVELS not sales. (thus I said "vital to all business")
That's absolutely batshit insane if true. How do they not understand that no one will use their site if they can't do it anonymously?!
First, you get to the point that management thinks enough people won't leave no matter what they do.
Second, you find some sketchy thing to do that will boost revenue and burn people's desire to use your product willingly into the ground.
Third, you leave on your golden parachute and the company acts surprised that this proved toxic and changes nothing.
Sadly this is becoming more common everywhere. Companies (and individual people) just don’t care about long term prospects. This includes SWE industry: if people switch companies every two years on average, why care about things like tech debt?
Decided to visit the website to delete my account. Lo and behold, the "Deactivate Account" button kicks off a perpetual loop that asks you to "Sign In Again To Delete Account" then dumps you on the same profile setting page, which prompts you again to log in... so you can't really delete your account, at least on web, without the help of support.
Edit: figured it out, is confusing
1. Remove social connection if this is how you logged in 2. Log Out 3. Upon login, request a password reset 4. Reset and login 5. Request Deletion 6. Enter newly created password
Strange, do you have any browser security extensions, aggressive cookie-blocking, or something similar? I was able to complete the process (see my comment below). I'm using Brave with ad blockers. The "deactivate" language is pretty misleading, but after entering account credentials, it did seem to delete the account completely.
It worked for me normally just now
your Glassdoor account
null pointer exception
This got a lol from me, well done
Seriously, I’ve browsed some of those sites in the past and the info is always bad info. Or at the very least, it’s not possible to discern the good info from the bad info on those sites.
I’ve never understood what compels people to go to those sites, I suspect it’s because people feel that it at least gives them a voice.
The only site with a modicum of value is LinkedIn, and even then you can probably come up with a million reasons to not use it.
When I signed up for Blind, I remember being a concerned that I had to use my work email to sign up. At the very least the employer can see that you signed up via the verification email.
I've heard of people randomly signing up their coworkers to create plausible deniability.
I mean, I guess that could work at a company with horrible security practices that you could verify through their email.
I definitely want to hear this from Glassdoor. I just can't imagine why Glassdoor would put a user's name alongside a review against the wish of the user in question. So I'll give Glassdoor a chance to clarify what's happening before getting my pitchfork.
It sounds like they aren't doing that, from what the glassdoor rep wrote. It sounds like the author is concerned that, in the event of a data leak, that their name can now be associated with their reviews, instead of just their email address.
Also more importantly, in a future product update:
If you pay for the Extra Premium Data Insights Package (TM), Glassdoor will happily give your real name to your employer so they can either see the reviews you've written about past employers or the review you wrote about your current employer.
While this isn't a real product (yet), you can't tell me there is a non zero risk on this one.
Disgusting. Thought about creating an account several times to see more salary information, but now I guess I never will.
I did that and they said I have to post information to see information, or something like that.
Account is untouched since then.
I made it a step further and shared some info and they were like "fuck you, we don't believe you".
I keep thinking about this response from a glassdoor employee, and what it implies about their decision making processes:
I stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile and it cannot be reverted or nullified/anonymized from the platform. I am sorry that we disagree on this issue. [...] This is my final determination. I, as well as multiple members of my team, have reviewed your request several times, and I am considering this matter closed.this is why the GDPR right of erasure exists
fuck these companies
There is no recourse except not to play. The end user has no choice. Sounds like a dictatorship.
Weird. I only see the option to deactivate an account, not delete or even close.
Damn this terribly company and their terrible, terrible dark patterns.
See my top-level comment. I went through this process and the confirmation message seems to indicate it does perform a deletion vs. a deactivation.
That’s super slimy of them — a while back I had spent some time investigating fake reviews on their platform [1] and also found that their moderation team has no strict processes in place to deal with bad actors.
You might be confused: to them, people like you and the OP are bad actors. What you mean by “bad actors” are their paying customers.
Wow, big dark UX pattern when trying to sign in now. I'm quite positive that I never linked my glassdoor account to google. Yet, Glassdoor was ambiguously saying on login "use your google account to login for your @gmail address!". To which google asked "are you sure you want to share info with glassdoor."
There was no way to enter my old password, I was forced to now link my account with google which force shared my email & name. I was really nervous about even enabling this linking... I bit the bullet, happily it looks like it is somewhat easy to delete reviews and finally the account. Getting there though, was forced to divulge new information.
I don't think I could have a lower opinion of glassdoor now..
I was able to login just now using an email address.
I have not logged into Glassdoor in a long time, I tried to log in after seeing this.
I get a prompt that I cannot dismiss about "Communities at Glassdoor" that I can't get past without putting in my employment information and name...
I can't even get too my account to delete it or emails support.
Love dark patterns...
I just lied about both things it wanted and it was fine with that, so it seems a little silly to make it a requirement
Tend to use blind for the inside scoop these days anyway
Blind is 10% inside scoop, 90% shitposting.
This is pretty shocking. I never use Glassdoor anyway, so deleted my account after reading. Worth noting that going to Settings only shows a button that says "Deactivate account", which seems misleading. Following this process does show a modal at the end that says "Account Deleted Confirmation. You have successfully deleted your account.", so seems like this is actually deletion vs. deactivation. (Your data stays in an archive DB for some period of time for legal reasons.)
also worth noting that if you attempt to go in via the mobile page, specifically to delete an account that predates "fish bowl" and mandatory names, you'll be bombarded with cascading popups that require your compliance (no x to exit, just "next" and filling in the relevant forms).
Based on this story, I already knew to expect resistance, but jesus fuck that was far worse than I imagined.
they had updated my profile to add my real name and location, the name pulled from the email From line I didn't think to cloak because who does that?
How did they get that if you never sent them an email? And if you sent them an email, you gave them your name (whatever name is in the from line)
Recently I contacted Glassdoor for an account-related issue. This led to them sending me email that I had to respond to. Big mistake.
So he put in a support request, likely via his account; they sent him an e-mail about it, likely to his Glassdoor account's e-mail. He replied from that e-mail address with his full name in the From: field, as most people do, and now they could link his full name with his e-mail address, and update his profile.
Sue the fuck out of them. Hope this company crashes and burns.
It's very possible that the full name from the email to the person's Glassdoor account was not manually performed by a human.
More than likely, their CRM software automatically tied their user-facing account with their support ticket email. Especially if the only unique identifier is based on email address. It's not hard to remove the name and location from the CRM, but because it would become a manual process they just don't want to have to deal with it.
FWIW, this theory could be put to test by signing up an account with username.extrachars@gmail.com and then sending a support email from username.extrachars+1@gmail.com, not sure if they would reject the support ticket as "emails not matched".
The enshittification of the world continues apace.
we need strong laws on data brokers. to protect our privacy from foreign and domestic actors.
My God what a sleazy company this is. I just logged in for the first time in ages to delete my account and it immediately gave me an inescapable modal requiring personal information, including my name!
I stopped using the site years ago once it became clear how corrupt they were about handling blatantly fake reviews, but this new name policy is a new low. Glassdoor can't be run out of business fast enough.
Done, account deleted, and thank you for the heads up. Genuinely, thankful for that post and maybe the most important social network I’m a part of: Hacker News.
This is precisely why I never created a glassdoor account. It's exactly the kind of thing I feared would happen.
I haven’t used Glassdoor for years. I just checked and my account didn’t have any personal information listed. My name and other fields in my profile were “*”
I didn’t see a way to delete my data but I don’t think they had much in the first place.
I did use the “deactivate account” option.
German site kununu may also be forced to disclose clear names of previously anonymous reviews [0]
So, what's left besides word of mouth?
[0] https://www.golem.de/news/urteil-kununu-muss-im-streitfall-k... (sorry, article in german)
Out of curiosity, I had a look at my account on glassdoor and my name is "Rollo Tomasi". Seems about right :)
Love the change. Now I can signup with employee name I dislike like a powerful manager and get them out.
You should request your data from a company like axciom. You can ask them to delete it while you’re at it.
They already know more about you than you’d ever want them to know. The fact that they hadn’t automatically matched your name before was either incompetence or simply being blocked by some frayed little law somewhere.
A little off topic, but his is a classic example of the problem where the laws just haven’t kept up with the technology.
Data collection and public government databases weren’t a problem when you had to go into some big office building somewhere to make a request, or maybe wait a couple weeks to sort it out through the mail.
Today, however, it’s easier than ever to gather this data at scales people can’t even imagine and this level of aggregation has eroded privacy to a degree that I don’t think is reversible anymore.
Anyway, here is a link to axcioms portal, although the cynic in me thinks that by requesting your data be deleted, all you’re doing is confirming your identity.
https://privacyportal.onetrust.com/webform/342ca6ac-4177-482...
As a senior manager I worked closely with a VP of engineering on the engineering culture - one of the expected outcome was the improvement of our Glassdoor company rating. But my VP (and probably the leadership) wanted to go fast. So my VP was in touch with someone at Glassdoor and had a way to 'tweak' or remove unpleasant reviews. I don't know the details but if there is definitely a way for companies to do that despite Glassdoor claiming that reviews can't be removed.
What the actual fuck, glasdoor just died for me. Tinker around with data to that degree is a nogo by all means.
Tell me you don't understand what makes your own website mildly attractive to employees without telling Mr.
Glassdoor has been mostly useless for quite some time now anyway. HR departments offer little trinkets to employees who leave a good review to boost their score, negative reviews can be taken down. Minimal value all around basically.
Well, I've understood Glassdoor to be useless for years due to supposedly allowing companies to control the existence of negative reviews, and I've never had an account. However, this is pretty disturbing and deserves to be more widely known if Glassdoor is actually now hostile to employees who might review former employers.
Thank you, I deleted my account.
All US tech companies ever, they are out there to doing the right thing until money rolls in then profits take the priority over quality and they go down the shitter.
1) Evernote
2) Triplebyte
3) Glassdoor
4) Let's not forget Quora
I had an employee on my team at a company I worked for once who used the CFO's real name to post a review trashing the company.
The real name policy had the opposite of the intended effect.
Thanks! You're right.
Just deleted all my glassdoor contributions, then deactivated my glassdoor account.
Surely this would discourage anyone posting legitimate reviews of their workplace but quite honestly, Glassdoor seems to only be for companies themselves to have a "badge" and not the potential employees.
I don't think it would be missed if it were to disappear tomorrow.
Glassdoor is one of the worst and first examples of "annoying paywalls" that I remember. (they don't require payment, but your login and personal info)
If this is how they're going to play it, RIP Glassdoor. Seems like a MAJOR breach of trust to allow users to submit content and participate anonymously THEN start revealing their names!
"If you are not willing to allow your name on your profile, you will again need to complete Data erasure once you are able to. However, we cannot remove this for you or make the changes you wish to see for your name."
I guess we know the appropriate action to take here. This is an absolutely BONE HEADED decision with regards to the operation of Glassdoor but I wonder what was the impetus for this? It looks like they're trying to convert their anonymous, Reddit-like, users to First Class Named Users for the purpose trying to compete with Linkedin to me.
I find the rationale here questionable and the execution plain nutty personally.
Site is close to unusable anyway. I have gotten emails from them about potentially interesting jobs, and then could never figure out how to actually view the job postings. Instead I’m sent through their review workflow to get access.
It will be pretty hilarious if we see 500 positive reviews exposed as being from Terry from HR on Glassdoor. Maybe it will help legitimize it a little.
Glassdoor seems very has-been at this point. They’re trying to move beyond the mix of folks trashing their employers and then charging employers to make the profile look better to now trying to be more of a serious career site. The ship has sailed on that front and they just seem on a slow march to irrelevance as has happened to lots of other similar career and employer review sites.
Shit, and I hate how all of these 'auto-login' prompts appear in Chrome, and if you accidentally click it, then boom, now your name is all over the place. Think this is how I ended up in GlassDoor to begin with.
Done. Thank you for the headsup
We built this tool as part of HiringSolved. Other signals included time in current position relative to industry average and personal history.
I will never understand how people can willingly build tools like this that almost exclusively serve to make employment miserable.
I think there's an explanation that is both more charitable and more pragmatic.
Companies try to keep employees happy and committed, and part of that is making sure they see a potential future / growth for themselves. As a manager I try to both make sure this is based in reality and that employees are picking up the message.
I like to think I am good at this but it's a difficult skill, and external signal to "hey, you might want to check in with Bob a bit more carefully next time to make sure he's feeling as good as we think he is" could always be valuable.
So even from Bob's perspective it's positive - he may get the extra conversation that increases his options where he stays. On the flip side, what's the malicious use case? "You updated your linkedIn so I am going to fire you" doesn't sound like company policy that's going to be implemented anywhere because it makes no sense.
You might be close to quitting (via perceived signal) so I’m going to give the high visibility project to someone “loyal”.
You may be perceived as a quitter so I’m going to give discretionary budget for the next raise to the employee who is more loyal.
You might be perceived as quitting, and my company requires me to stack rank employees. The lowest gets fired. I put you there to keep the rest of my team. You become a “sacrifice” since you were going to quit anyways.
And these are just the examples my friends at Amazon talk about. I’m sure there’s more.
Now consider all of the above, but now you’re on a visa. Losing your job means you have a few weeks to replace it or get deported.
Typically these tools are bought and used by HR or Talent Acq departments, not managers so the type of detailed decision-making you’re describing wasn’t a use-case in my experience.
It’s more like a roll-up metric that can be looked at globally, by role, department, location, etc. yes, it can also be used at the individual level but again, HR is the buyer and they are the most fearfully bureaucratic department in most companies .
From a data and capability perspective, I agree it’s a little scary. But in practice I doubt it’s used this way and if so, there’s your retention problem.
IMO a company that would rely on this kind of invasive surveillance is not really interested in the well being of their employees. There are far better and less invasive ways to evaluate employee satisfaction and fulfillment than hiring an outside organization to "dig up dirt", for the lack of a better term.
To me it's no different than a company hiring a PI to follow me around so they can report back how many drinks I have on the weekend at a barbecue. Or following me around to find out if I bought a new suit and tie (oh no, might indicate I'm going for an interview!). Just because it's being done digitally doesn't make it any less invasive.
What's next? Grocery stores start selling my buying habits to my employer? That would definitely give them more insight into whether I'm happy and committed. Banks/Credit card companies selling my purchase history?
Originally it was built as the inverse. A signal that recruiters could use to tell them which “passive candidates” could be more willing to change jobs.
A customer asked if it could be used internally (we already had their ATS/HRIS data) so a new feature was born.
Yes money was a motive but this particular feature didn’t seem like an evil idea to be used to increase employee misery.
That said, We did build some things that I do regret now.
Amazing what people are willing to trade in exchange for a fat salary with decent benefits. Even if it means trading their moral code.
There's a strong component of "If I don't someone else will", but also, usually this is the kind of thing that sucks at getting general open/free solutions, because no one does it willingly, yet it's easy for an employer to justify paying for (And economically incentivize it's development)
Late stage capitalism makes us do it.
Let me give you a hint how: it involves a money transaction.
The family needs to eat and as an American with no social or economic safety net, my morals play a very small role.
Can you tell us more? What signals should I be worried about employers looking at?
It’s worse and deeper than you’d want to know. That said most HR Tech companies and large corporate HR departments are incompetent so it’s not really as scary in practice as it sounds.
Also GDPR/CCPA has hamstrung a lot of this and HR depts are fairly petrified about it. Talent Acquisition, not so much…
Wait, how much worse, and how much deeper? Unless that kind of stuff is a trade secret.
Your website returns: Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.allegisgroup.com, allegisgroup.com
hiring solved
Sold the company to Allegis.
Do you sleep well at night?
Yes, actually. Hiring sucks. We wanted to make it better.
I believe we did do that by showing the HR world that data driven insights could be a better indicator than what school someone went to or whether they played Ultimate Frisbee (a real hiring signal used by a Fortune 500 tech co).
We didn’t solve hiring. It’s a tough problem with many strange human biases and rituals. But I do think we made it better even if only a little.
Let them squirm. Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives. Take it even to starting a union if needed.
You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.
> Let them squirm.
The risk here isn't that your snooping boss feels a bit uncomfortable.
The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.
Or it guarantees you’re in the next round of layoffs. You’re now a liability and they’ll be looking for a replacement with better loyalty signals.
You will be on the next round of layoffs regardless of your loyalty. "You were updating linkedin" is the excuse. It could be anything else. But the reality is that they found someone cheaper.
Avoidant attachment at its best.
You can wait for others to promote you as a carrot or you can promote yourself. With more power on the labor side, you can more easily promote yourself.
Big Tech started with a lot of power in labor due to the knowledge economy, and is losing a lot of their core power. Thus wages will start slipping more and more and converge to general market rate for talent. Reclaim that power!
"Could" is such a big word. It means nothing, but it is intended to be very valuable. Get that promotion in writing. Otherwise it's a carrot to dangle upon you.
You know what's worse than training people and then these people leaving? Not training them and then these people staying.
You insist on giving me reasons to stay away from that company.
All of that is reasonable, but none of it works unless you can get ~everyone in your org to do it.
Managers want prisoners. Tradespeople don't fall for this shjt, white collar employees shouldn't.
Employers and recruiters are always bewildered when I say I don't have a LinkedIn account, or a public Github profile (I have a few tiny open source projects I maintain, but they are all pseudonymous) - and this is exactly why.
I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.
It's by no means a limiting factor if they don't have one, but when I'm interviewing for mid - staff+ level engineers in my specific field I absolutely love when they have some sort of project portfolio I can look at. Github, Gitlab, medium, whatever.
I learn so little from a persons bullet pointed resume that when I don't have those the interviews feel like I'm pretty much walking in completely ignorant to this persons interests and skills over and over again.
When I can go "oh neat, jbob99 worked on a foss project I used a few years ago!" it's nice.
But I also couldn't care less about being "creeped" on. Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.
You're using a completely random throwaway nick to stay anonymous on here, while I've literally gotten jobs from hn and grown my career from it. Just like I did on IRC when I was 13. It's an interesting difference of use.
I don't mean one is better or worse at all and I totally get wanting to be anonymous.
People often have reasons outside of their control for being anonymous. Others have employment contracts that limit what outside business interests they can be involved in, including open source. That being said, I've been on HN for 2 years longer than you, 2/3rds the karma, and zero job offers so what do I know.
Linkedin is required to market yourself though or else you can't bullshit your way through the HR hoops.
No. I have plenty of clients over the years and not a single on ever asked my LinkedIn and / or any other social. And if they ever will the answer will be NO. Well other than HN I am not really on social media anyways. Just have couple of accounts to talk to a couple of people.
I have such public accounts but they are specifically for said creeping.
My take is exactly the opposite: the more people who know that I exist, the more likely I am to hear of jobs that might interest me.
Let them creep all over my profile: so far the only downside is that I have a pile of messages to sort through and say "no, thanks" to.
If you can help it, it’s best to leave (or not start at) a company with such practices anyway.
That's difficult to identify.
I've never really seen retention risk tooling used for evil in the way that most HN readers seem to think it is; it's kind of interesting and eye-opening to me to see the strong negative sentiment towards it.
I've worked in management at companies with risk-based retention tools, and I've always seen them used as just that... retention tools. If anything, getting a high risk score as a high performer would usually be greatly in an employee's best interest, as it would be another justification to the higher-ups for a raise or better job assignment.
To be clear, I'm personally generally against these kind of panopticon data-slurp initiatives overall, I'm just surprised that the initial reaction is so strongly "my manager will use this to fire me" when I've only ever seen the opposite.
I've never even heard of these tools before now, but my impression is the same as yours: the people they flag are more likely to be the kind of people that you want to keep.
I feel like if managers are using third party tools to try and find employees changing their linkedin,, they have waaay too little to do
Very few managers would do this themselves. It is far more likely to be done by HR or an HR-adjacent group and a report sent to a manager.
Perfect, I can update my LinkedIn profile when the project is in a critical phase and I know managers are making increment decisions
It can be useful to know who's near the door so that you may rectify the situation, it doesn't necessarily have to be slimy. Benefit of the doubt I guess. DX (getdx.com) has it and it's very pro-worker.
It reminds of a concept, which barring a better name, is "action through inaction" — if you know an employee is unhappy through external signals like these, you could make the active effort to not engage with them knowing that it may lead them to quit; instead of a lengthy severance/redundancy discussion.
I've seen similar insights, derived from a person's social-graph through email exchanges, and it was decided to not be used by managers as it could be a liability.
This can be a positive too, proactive dive & save to retain an employee who's manager feel they're about to leave isn't unheard of in my company.
If you're good at your job and highly rated there should be obvious signs when they're trying to preemptively backfill you and at that point you can just communicate about how excited you are about your growth at the company or something to make them take a step back.
Even some rudimentary effort on a given manager's part could find LinkedIn updates.
I'm not convinced this is always an ultimately bad outcome if someone finds that.
I think this was done to me. I didn't even signin or anything, just looked around at what options are out there and started getting questions about my plans to leave.
What I've learned is if you plan to change jobs assume everyone at your current job will find out the minute you have an interview booked. Only applies to big companies that pay 3rd parties to monitor their employees like that though.
Sometimes I wish we had germany's privacy laws for employees in the US.