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One day in 2007, in Seattle, Rich Barton, the C.E.O. of the real-estate Web site Zillow, was getting ready for the company’s annual reviews. The process—talking to each employee about his or her performance and whether he or she would be getting a raise—called for discretion and tact. On his computer, he pulled up a spreadsheet containing the salary and stock options for every employee, and pressed Print. However, instead of sending the document to his personal printer, he sent it to one in the middle of the open-plan office. When Barton’s assistant realized the mistake, she rushed across the room to retrieve the document before anyone could read it. She succeeded, but the moment stayed with Barton. As he likes to tell people, it led him to wonder: why, exactly, was this information secret, aside from the fact that making it public could be extremely awkward?
Barton had started out at Microsoft, where, in the mid-nineties, while running the travel-business unit, he came up with the idea of selling airline tickets through the Internet. Back then, this, too, ran counter to social norms. Responsible people did not give their credit-card information to a computer; if you wanted to buy a plane ticket, you talked to your local travel agent, who gave you crumbs of information. “You had to literally ask what the prices and schedules were,” Barton recalled recently. In 1996, he persuaded Bill Gates to spin off Microsoft’s travel unit as its own company, Expedia, which, with other sites, changed the travel landscape. Customers discovered that they could not only buy plane tickets online but also tap into huge caches of information in order to get the best deals. Airlines, now that they no longer had to pay commissions to travel agents, could lower their ticket prices; travel agents could enroll in culinary school, or take up woodworking.
In 2003, Barry Diller’s company I.A.C. acquired Expedia, and Barton left to start Zillow. A Zillow feature called Zestimate used data from past listings to calculate the price of every house in the country, with the result that everyone suddenly knew the answer to the world’s worst dinner-party question: “Nice place. How much did you pay for it?” Barton came to see Expedia and Zillow, which used the Internet to correct “information asymmetries” in markets, as part of the same project. He told me, “We were empowering people with information and tools that they didn’t have before.” His slogan was “Power to the people,” and, after the printer incident, he realized that it could be applied to the world of work, too. Why should a job seeker have to furtively call around to find out how much she should be making as an operations manager at Xerox? Shouldn’t such information be online? Bosses might be nervous about a potential backlash, but, then again, as Barton said, “if I’m doing a good job as a leader, and the management and H.R. teams are promoting people and paying them fairly, then a sheet like that ought to make sense.” He went on, “Everyone ought to be able to look at it and say, ‘Yeah, Jane deserves that raise.’ ”
Barton handed his idea off to a former employee, Robert Hohman, who, in 2008, launched Glassdoor. Today, it is the second most popular jobs Web site, after Indeed, and is valued at more than a billion dollars. It has job listings, but it is also a Yelp for workplaces, on which people share salary information and post anonymous reviews evaluating their office environments. Among the site’s features are company ratings, based on how many stars the employees award the organization, on a scale of one to five; and C.E.O. approval ratings, given as a percentage of how many people approve of the company’s leadership. Initially, most of the jobs listed and reviewed were at tech companies in Silicon Valley, but the site now has thirty-three million reviews of more than seven hundred thousand companies in almost two hundred countries.
Glassdoor upended workplace power dynamics in the same way that Ratemyprofessors.com altered the power dynamics of college lecture halls, where, suddenly, professors had to worry about whether their students found them to be “inspirational” or “hot.” “It definitely changed the way business leaders thought,” Beth Comstock, a former vice-chair of G.E., told me. “There’d been a march for more transparency that had come along with the digitization of business. But suddenly it became very personal. People were, like, ‘Wait a minute, they’re going to be rating me?’ ”
To scroll through a company’s Glassdoor page is to experience the frisson of setting eyes on hitherto secret stuff: the Pentagon Papers, or your sister’s diary. Here, beneath the impressive company logo, are tales of interdepartmental feuds (“Sales reps blame the support team . . . tech support blames sales”), managerial chaos (“Stop the drama. This isn’t high school”) and insecure bosses (“makes fun of what the employees are wearing, trying to be funny”), weird vibes (“cult-like culture”) and smells (“rubbing alcohol”). There are confessions (“I’ve made a terrible mistake coming here”) and earnest pleas (“appreciate the crewmembers!”).
Any one review on Glassdoor, like any single restaurant review on Yelp or product review on Amazon, may be misleading, useless, or unhinged. One user I spoke to, Blake Bolan, said that the process of sifting through reviews of a tech company she was interested in was like browsing Yelp reviews of her favorite restaurant, the Red Pepper Diner, near Beacon, New York. “It’s in a little building with a gas station. It doesn’t look like much, but you walk in and they serve the most amazing Sri Lankan food,” Bolan said. It gets many five-star reviews. “But I was recently wondering, as I was eating there for the millionth time: do they have any one- or two-star reviews?” They did. “I looked at it and was, like, Oh, this person got a burger! I’d never get a burger there.” Bolan is now happily working at the tech company.
And yet the quirks of anonymous online reviews—typos, digressions, outbursts—also give them a certain authority. Even if you’re not looking for a job, there is a voyeuristic fascination in a review left by, say, a vice-president at Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters (pro: “good gym”; con: “Leaving at 5pm is a half day”), or by a dog handler at the Spot Experience, in Tribeca (“They expected me to master this ‘alpha’ mentality in 4 months”), or by a server at the Trump Hotel on Waikiki Beach, where, according to one reviewer, the pros include “beautiful location with ocean views.” The cons:
(The hotel did not respond to a request for comment.)
A recent survey by Software Advice claims that nearly fifty per cent of job seekers in the U.S. read Glassdoor reviews. There are reviews of jobs at mall kiosks, truck stops, and Amazon warehouse facilities. But it is in higher-paid industries like tech and consulting, where workers wield the most negotiating power, that the reviews hold the most sway. Beth Steinberg, the chief people officer at the online insurance company Zenefits, who previously worked at Electronic Arts, Facebook, and Nike, told me, “It’s pretty rare that a job candidate doesn’t look at Glassdoor before they come in. Often, they bring it up in the interview. They’ll say, ‘I read this on Glassdoor. How do you respond?’ ”
Anne Diebel, who works for Q.R.I., a private-investigation firm often hired by investors, recalled using the site to conduct a background check on a C.E.O.: “The Glassdoor reviews taught us that his peers saw him as entrepreneurial, while the staff saw him as arrogant, a perception that was confirmed by interviews we did.” Journalists keep an eye on the site. Last year, Glassdoor reviews tipped off a reporter to ethical issues at the Silicon Valley food startup Hampton Creek; reporters later discovered a “mayo buyback” scheme, in which contract employees had shopped for Hampton Creek’s vegan mayonnaise in grocery stores. (The company has since been cleared of wrongdoing by the Justice Department.)
Some of the site’s biggest enthusiasts are those advocating for social change. Laura Kray, a social psychologist studying gender in the workplace, told me, “In terms of academic research, if your goal is to increase gender equality, it’s hard to come up with a downside of greater transparency.” Some evidence suggests that women fail to demand higher wages because they experience more backlash than men do for being “pushy” in negotiations. Kray said that a printout from Glassdoor—a list of salaries for comparable jobs in the industry, or results from the site’s Know Your Worth feature—can provide “objective criteria you can refer to, instead of saying, ‘I think I’m worth this.’ ”
Glassdoor reviews provide real-time accounts of “boys’ club” dynamics, uncomfortable hugs, and demands for sexual favors by management. Jennifer Berdahl, who studies workplace sexual harassment at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, calls the site “a really exciting development,” comparing it to the scribbles on bathroom walls. “This is just putting on the Internet what’s been going on forever—women whispering about bad experiences they’ve had within companies,” she said. As recent scandals at companies like Uber and Fox News have proved, internal monitoring systems such as human resources are often “junk,” Berdahl said, when it comes to protecting workers from harassment: “They’re only as good as the people who can fire them.” When a company has a toxic or abusive culture, she said, “whistle-blowing—going outside the company—is the only alternative. You can do it by leaving, or by writing about the company online and exposing it to the public, so the shock and condemnation force a change. And hopefully the market will start taking care of it.”
Recent scandals have also shown corporations, and their shareholders, that workplace “culture” is a serious topic—and that a bad culture, left untended, can become an existential threat. In the past two years, Zenefits laid off half its employees and its C.E.O. resigned after the company was caught breaking insurance laws. Reports later emerged of a frat-house atmosphere, where employees drank and had sex in stairwells. Steinberg, one of the executives who joined the company in the aftermath, said that Zenefits has a coördinator who now reads all the company’s Glassdoor reviews, to monitor “day-to-day culture stuff.”
Spencer Rascoff, the C.E.O. of Zillow Group, who took over from Barton, calls himself “the Naked C.E.O.” “I was focussed on corporate culture before it was cool,” he told me. He reads every review of his company on Glassdoor and responds to many of them himself. He said, “It’s common for me to walk out of a meeting and write on Twitter, ‘Just finished a great meeting with @camille reviewing our P.R. goals for 2018.’ ” The constant communication, he said, “shows my other thirty-five hundred employees that I care, and it gives Camille a thrill. And maybe she amplifies it to her social network, which retweets it and shares it.” Rascoff, whose employees have given him a ninety-three-per-cent approval rating on Glassdoor, said that these efforts build an “employer brand,” which helps in the battle to attract talent in Silicon Valley.
Last year, twenty-one per cent of workers in the U.S. changed jobs, and the consulting firm Deloitte has estimated that companies spend more than two hundred billion dollars annually on finding people to fill the positions. Glassdoor sees an opportunity in this. In addition to publishing job listings, the company sells “enhanced profiles,” which are like display ads in the Yellow Pages. Glassdoor creates a bare-bones Web page for any company that gets a review, which will often appear at the top of a Google search. The company can’t make Glassdoor take the page down, but, for a minimum of six thousand dollars a year, and often an amount well into six figures, it can “claim” its Glassdoor page and make it look nicer—adding photographs and mission statements. For a higher fee, the company can customize its page for different types of workers, or get rid of advertisements from competitors. Jeremy Heimans, the co-author of “New Power,” a forthcoming book about the implications of growing online participation, described to me the process of getting a “Glassdoor face-lift” as “gentle extortion.” Threatening to damage your reputation, Glassdoor charges you to repair it.
One day last fall, I met with Robert Hohman, Glassdoor’s C.E.O., at the company’s Chicago office. He had just hosted a TED-like conference (tagline: “Winning with informed candidates”) where C.E.O.s and talent recruiters took notes on how to operate in the new era of corporate transparency. Hohman, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, resembles the actor Jeff Daniels; friendly and rumpled, he wore jeans, and his blond hair was slicked back. According to Glassdoor, ninety-one per cent of employees approve of Hohman’s performance. The other nine per cent include a former sales director, who recently griped about a “culture of blame” at the company’s Mill Valley, California, headquarters and advised Hohman to “stop standing up in meetings dropping F-Bombs like a 6th grader with a head injury.”
Hohman hasn’t spent a lot of time sending his résumé to H.R. departments. He was hired to work at Microsoft as soon as he graduated from Stanford, where he studied computer science, and became part of Rich Barton’s circle of frequent collaborators, a genial group that reminded me of the all-male crew of actors who regularly work with the movie director Judd Apatow. Another member of the group, the investor Erik Blachford, who is on the boards of Zillow and Glassdoor, described Hohman as a “hard-core technical engineer” who is also “a fun guy.” At Microsoft, Hohman was known for being motivated, but also for having a mischievous streak. He once told the members of his engineering team that, if they hit their ship date, he would shave Barton’s head in front of the entire staff. (It happened.) In 1996, Barton hired Hohman to work for Expedia, where he spent two years running Hotwire, a hotel-booking Web site that the company had acquired. After leaving Expedia, he decided to stay home with his wife and two young kids in Mill Valley and play the online video game World of Warcraft, in which multiple players control character avatars and fulfill “quests” in “guilds.” When Barton came to Hohman with the printer anecdote, he knew that Hohman was ready to start a company of his own. Plus, Barton told me, “I kind of knew Robert was playing a lot of World of Warcraft.”
Hohman told me that, when he spoke to Barton, he had been playing the game for six months straight. Barton’s idea about making salary information transparent had struck him not merely as a good business concept but as an opportunity to mimic the guilds that the game’s characters form and join: “I was thinking that, if we built a platform that let people help each other, by sharing information, that could scale way more than we ever could by researching companies ourselves.” He said yes to Barton—who became an early investor in Glassdoor, and is now the non-executive chairman of its board—and teamed up with Tim Besse, another Microsoft-Expedia alum.
Vault, JobVent, and FuckedCompany already provided workers with places to gossip and rail, but such forums had a reputation as “rant sites for angry people,” Hohman said. In order to keep the conversation on Glassdoor “constructive,” he and his co-founders created a set of Community Guidelines, which included: no profanity or discriminatory language; no personal attacks; no sharing trade secrets; and no naming individuals who are below the level of the most senior executives, known as the “C-suite.”
Some early reviews posed other kinds of problems. “ ‘People are doing coke in the bathroom, and the C.E.O. is a drug addict,’ ” Hohman said. “That was a tough one. Is it relevant to a job seeker? Well, yes. But it’s also a criminal matter. The question is, are we the forum to resolve it?” After some discussion, Hohman and his colleagues decided that information about nonviolent crimes—drug use, sexual harassment, financial malfeasance—should be published, since it was relevant. When reviews contained threats of violence or descriptions of violent crime, like rape and murder, they would contact the authorities. (In April, 2013, after a user left a review of a hospital where he used to work which included a threat to bomb it, Glassdoor contacted the hospital, which called the police. The man was arrested.)
When it comes to sexual harassment, Glassdoor’s spokespeople noted that posting about it on the site should not replace reporting it through “appropriate channels.” But Hohman was enthusiastic about the site’s potential to curb abuse. Bringing up the #MeToo movement, he said, “This time that we’re going through, I do not think it’s an accident that it’s happening as transparency has been on the rise. If you wanted to run a racist, misogynistic company where there was sexual harassment going on, the only way you could possibly do that is to have there be this ironclad veil of secrecy. Which is basically what Harvey Weinstein had.”
In 2008, shortly before Glassdoor’s launch, Hohman called his sister, Melissa Fernandez, in Akron. She had just given birth to her first child and wanted to work from home. He enlisted her to read every review that was submitted to the site, scanning them for violations of the Community Guidelines. When the workload got to be too much, Fernandez recruited Cara Barry, another stay-at-home mom, who recruited a third mom, her neighbor. Eventually, this group—the content-moderation team—grew to include twenty-six people, several of them men, although for years employees at Glassdoor’s headquarters referred to them as “the WAHMs,” for “work-at-home moms.” During the past decade, Glassdoor has built machine-learning algorithms to screen for fraud and profanity, and the members of Fernandez’s team read anything that users have flagged; these days, they also read half of all reviews submitted to the site regardless—a step that Yelp and TripAdvisor don’t take, Hohman said.
Hohman had also attempted to deal with a common problem plaguing online reviews. In statistics, it’s known as “voluntary response bias”—the fact that volunteers are more likely to have extreme opinions. Hohman calls it the “J-shaped curve.” If you were to graph the number of stars that voluntary reviewers assign to things, you’d get a relatively large quantity of five-star reviews, from the people who love whatever they are writing about; a low number of fours, threes, or twos; and mostly ones, from the foaming-at-the-mouth furious.
From the start, Hohman instituted a “give to get” policy at Glassdoor. As a user, before you can look at any information on the site you must contribute an anonymous review of your own current job or one that you’ve held in the past five years, or share your salary. (Glassdoor users are allowed one review per year for each company they’ve worked at.) Hohman says that this gives everyday users greater incentive to contribute to the site, and he claims that it shows in Glassdoor’s data. “From the beginning, the average rating has been 3.2, which is not low,” he said. “And, if you looked at the distribution, it’s not bimodal. Seventy per cent of reviews are in the middle hump, where you are satisfied with your job but not ecstatic. Like, ‘Things are O.K. Work is fine.’ ”
Still, the one-star reviews make a strong impression. I learned more about the site from a friend, Alexa Hirschfeld, who, in 2008, founded Paperless Post, a New York tech startup that makes online invitations. Her company recently chose to end an entire business line, printed invitations, in order to put more resources into digital, and laid off fifteen per cent of the staff. “That was when I realized the crazy power of this thing,” she told me. Within days of the layoffs, the negative reviews started trickling in. “We went from a four-star average to a bunch of one-star reviews with very angry descriptions.” The company’s over-all score went down, and potential recruits started asking questions. She went on, “Basically, as a company, you have to make really hard decisions. And, if you make everybody happy, you’re not going to succeed.”
When I mentioned this to Hohman, he sighed. “People will say, ‘I fired that person! Why would you let them write a review?’ ” he said. “My answer is, that person is writing about their own experience, and their one data point is valid.” He also argued that turmoil and even layoffs do not necessarily result in bad reviews: “How you’re treated when you’re separating says a lot about companies. Caterpillar”—the construction-equipment company—“was one of the big ones. In 2009, they laid off twenty thousand people, and their ratings actually went up, they did such a good job communicating—the communication was just so crisp.”
Last fall, Dawn Lyon, Glassdoor’s chief reputation officer (and now a consultant), told me that bosses often feel wronged by Glassdoor: “People say, ‘I have a Glassdoor problem.’ We deal with that all the time. The question is, do you really have a Glassdoor problem, or is it a reflection of something going on inside the company?” Some people suspect that Glassdoor might make certain allowances to paying clients, but Hohman adamantly denied this. “No special treatment for clients versus non-clients,” he said. “With new sales hires, the first value I lead with is integrity. Everyone needs to know the day they start we’ll never trade a review for money. Because once we do that we’ve lost all credibility as a neutral platform.”
The company insists that, since the reviews and the scores on the site are “a mirror that reflects back on companies,” as Lyon put it, there should be no quick fixes for bad reviews, and no shortcuts to improve a company’s ratings. Josh Bersin, a consultant from Deloitte, said in a speech at Glassdoor’s conference, “The bottom line is, no matter how much you try to influence Glassdoor surveys, the ultimate problem is building the irresistible organization.”
And yet, as Glassdoor’s paying clients will tell you, there is an easy way to raise your company’s scores, by increasing what Glassdoor calls “employee engagement.” Glassdoor warns employers not to offer incentives in exchange for reviews: “We will remove positive reviews where we have evidence that employees were compensated and/or coerced.” But there is nothing preventing companies from encouraging their employees to write reviews on the site—especially if they are likely to write good ones. (In response to Hirschfeld’s complaints, a Glassdoor client representative told her that, after she’s had a great conversation with an employee, “you just say, ‘Would you mind leaving your feedback on Glassdoor?’ ”)
At the conference, Marie Artim, the vice-president of talent acquisition at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, told me that the company reminds managers to tell newly promoted employees, “Congratulations! Go change your LinkedIn profile! Give us a Glassdoor review!” Thomas Pullen, a recruiter for an industrial-chemical company, said that his company’s scores were abysmal until he launched an internal e-mail campaign: “I told everyone, ‘Hey, go to Glassdoor! Leave us a review!’ In six months, we went from 2.8 to 3.9.” In a recent article about corporate change at the online marketplace Etsy, the Times noted that the company’s Glassdoor reviews “portray a company in decline,” and that, soon after a reporter contacted the company, several new reviews appeared on the site, with titles like “Why I Love Etsy.” Etsy said that it did not encourage its employees to leave reviews on Glassdoor.
But the “fake positive” review, apparently written by a management-appointed shill, is a common feature of the site. The biggest tells are often in the “Cons” section—“So much free food. I’ve gained 8 pounds!”; “No cons”; “Sometimes I feel like I love my job too much”—and under “Advice to management,” when the reviewer writes some version of “Keep up the great work!” Hohman has the same attitude toward dubious positive reviews as he does toward agenda-driven rants. “Everything is only a single source,” he said. “It’s when you hear the same thing multiple times, in multiple different voices, that it tends to have an effect.” But almost everyone I spoke with—worker or manager—had a Glassdoor conspiracy theory: the company encourages fake reviews, because they bring in more Web traffic; if you know someone at Glassdoor, she can get a negative review taken down or a positive one pushed to the top of the page; a friend’s comments were deleted under mysterious circumstances. (According to Glassdoor, none of this is true.)
Laurie Ruettimann, who writes about human resources and is a consultant for companies such as Pfizer and Monsanto, suggested that such mistrust might stem from Glassdoor’s business model. The company presents itself as a tool for employees, like a union, but it is funded, in part, by their bosses, like an H.R. department. “It’s ambiguous messaging,” Ruettimann said. She tells the companies she advises, “Don’t hire people to read Glassdoor, don’t comment on negative feedback. Once you respond to one review, you have to respond to everybody. It’s a black hole that doesn’t necessarily yield anything for you.” As for the fees, she said, “You’re better off, in terms of your company’s reputation, if you invest that money in your own Web site and your own management training.”
From Chicago, Hohman returned to San Francisco. Dawn Lyon and I went to visit the content-moderation team, which works in an office park in Green, Ohio, five miles from the Akron airport. Melissa Fernandez met us at the door. She has a “Rachel” haircut, wire-rimmed glasses, and an even-keeled demeanor. She introduced her team of moderators—twenty-one other women and four men, working at adjustable-height desks. According to Glassdoor’s Glassdoor page, the Ohio office is the happiest of the company’s six locations, beating London and San Francisco, with a 5.0 rating—a perfect score. Fernandez explained that this is in part because the team has a great culture, and also because its San Francisco-style startup perks—yoga classes, dogs in the office, flexibility to work from home—are virtually unheard of in Akron, where the biggest employers are factories and call centers. Laura Beth Mercina, the team’s head of community care, previously worked at Arby’s. She said, “I tell people about my job at Glassdoor, and they’re, like, ‘Is this place real?’ ”
Working for a platform like Glassdoor is a little different from working for a traditional publication like The New Yorker. There’s no investigative reporting, copy-editing, or fact-checking. (A popular office mantra is “We are not the finders of fact.”) Whereas a publication is legally responsible for what it publishes, Glassdoor’s reviews are the responsibility of its reviewers. This demands a hands-off approach from the moderators, each of whom reads eighty to a hundred reviews per hour—many years’ worth of employment. If they see a violation of the Community Guidelines, they reject the review. If the situation is ambiguous, Fernandez said, they ask themselves, and sometimes one another, “Is it helpful to the job seeker?”
“ ‘The C.E.O.’s super fat and greasy,’ ” one of the moderators, Cara Barry, said, citing an example. “We get that a lot.” This comment would normally be a violation (personal attack), but the moderators decided to make an exception in the case of a fitness company, where someone had noted, “The C.E.O. is obese and smokes a pack of Marlboros a day.” (Helpful to the job seeker.)
Barry brought up another review, which Glassdoor had been sent by a British finance company. Under “Pros,” the employee had written, “Good place to work for.” Under “Cons”: “Not enough British ethnics employed!” Was this discriminatory language?
“It’s a gray area,” Fernandez said, explaining that the comment didn’t single out a particular ethnic group for insult. Barry left it up.
Barry leads the fraud team, which reads reviews caught by the fraud-detecting software; these are often sent from fake e-mail addresses. “It’s more about gaming—trying to leave multiple five-star reviews to make your company’s score go up, or an angry employee trying to leave a bunch of negative reviews to make the company look bad,” she said.
The moderators handle a lot of regrets, Barry said. “We get a lot of e-mails where people say, ‘I changed my mind! How do I take it down right now?’ ”
“Or ‘I didn’t know you were going to publish my job title! Now they’ll know who I am!’ ” Fernandez added. (Glassdoor now allows users to delete their own reviews.)
The closest readers of Glassdoor—and the moderators’ main correspondents—are employers. “The employer is always sure they know who wrote the review,” Fernandez said. “They say things like ‘I know this is Ann Smith from H.R., and she was an alcoholic!’ ” According to the moderators, they are almost always wrong.
I asked how often employers threaten lawsuits. “Daily,” Fernandez said. (Although users are responsible for what they write, the company will go to court to protect their anonymity from employers; most cases are dismissed, on First Amendment grounds.) Generally, if a boss merely disagrees with a review, his or her only option is to write a response on Glassdoor. But the boss can also “flag” the review, to indicate that it contains a violation of the Guidelines. “There are so many ways employers have found to try to get us to take things down,” Fernandez went on. “ ‘That’s not an employee!’ ‘We never had a location in that place!’ ”
Krystle Neeb, a member of the flag team, read aloud a review that had been flagged by the management of an I.T. company, in which the reviewer had written, “Bleeding heart liberals such as myself may have issue with a few of their clients.” He or she disliked having to work on a project “for an anti-gay fundamentalist religious client.” A discussion ensued among the moderators.
Fernandez said, “In my opinion, it’s not discriminatory. They’re not saying anything negative about gays.” Neeb wondered if the review could be perceived as discriminatory against anti-gay religious fundamentalists. The moderators reflected, inadvertently engaging in the decision-making process currently under way in the wedding-cake case before the Supreme Court. The review got a pass.
Leann Boso, also on the flag team, rejected a review that advised management, “Sever ties with Head of Communication as quickly as possible.” (Negative comment about an individual below the C-suite.)
In a message to Glassdoor about another review, headlined “Opportunity,” a user had written, “This looks fake as all get out.”
“It’s probably positive,” Fernandez said. Boso scanned the review, which awarded the company five stars and claimed that senior leadership “has done a great job diversifying the business model for long term growth and stability.” The only con was that the environment was “so fast paced and dynamic you have to stay focused on core responsibilities.”
“This is fine,” Boso said.
But what if it was written by the head of the company’s P.R. department? “The head of the P.R. department can leave a review, too,” Lyon said. “It’s allowed.” ♦
A previous version of the article incorrectly stated the percentage of job-seekers who read Glassdoor reviews. It also misquoted Robert Hohman on the bimodality of rating distribution.
