Stalking Venus

Now here’s a bunch of people with a great idea: A website that allows employees to post anonymous reviews of the company they work for, including the salary that they are being paid.

The website then compiles these reviews and cross references them with reviews from other companies. In this way, a visitor to the site can quickly see who’s earning what and where, as well as how happy the person is there.

You can also get an at-a-glance view of what salaries are being earned for the same position across different companies, both at the top and the bottom end of the scale. In the above example, you can see that Google software engineers get paid more at the top end, less at the bottom end and on average, more than Microsoft engineers.

Reading through some of the reviews, I often found myself thinking things like “oh, that’s pretty cool. I wouldn’t have thought about that”, like when someone who loves their company rates it downward because of the heavy traffic in the area where the company is based.

“Seattle traffic is horrendous. A twenty mile commute is about an hour commute each way. That may be common for other big metros but it’s annoying to me.”

Or how about the fact that real estate in the area is very expensive? It’s insider insights like these that can turn out to be absolute gold when trying to assess whether a move to a new company is going to be a good one.

Drilling-down into a company gives you the actual employee reviews, where they rate the company that they work for and write up a review based on their experiences. This rating is broken down into details like ‘morale’ and ‘work/life balance’.

It’s also where things get a little tricky…

It seems that it would be very difficult for a person in a more senior position to post a negative review without jeopardising their position. For example, if a ’senior sales manager’ in a team that only has two or three senior sales managers writes up a negative review, then they could well end up in a great deal of trouble for doing so.

The converse is also true - A disgruntled employee might write up a glowing review as a way to brown-nose management into better treatment, human resources management might write false reviews to try and attract new employees, or unscrupulous staff may write up reviews for fellow workers that they don’t like as a modern extension to common office politics. It would be wise for Glassdoor.com to keep a firm eye on the social networking scene to see the sort of shit people can get up to when allowed to hide behind an electronic identity.

While the site doesn’t do much (yet) to address these projected concerns, there is a lot of hope, and while it’s still very much in beta and limited to the San Francisco bay area, I for one am adding it to my watch-list as a trend that’s bound to spawn a large following. Just as Facebook has become a tool for employers to suss-out potential employees, so might Glassdoor.com and it’s ilk become a vital tool for job-hunters investigating prospective new employers.

Source: Glassdoor.com via IOL