2010
The future is clear
If you haven’t done so already, you definitely should take a look at www.glassdoor.com. This is an amazing web site, created by some incredibly visionary people (more on that later).
As its name implies, Glassdoor allows you to see inside—of companies. It has anonymous ratings of over 37,000 companies and their CEOs, based on “employee surveys.” (BTW, it also has salary information and the inside scoop on what job interviews are like at companies.)
A look around the Glassdoor site reveals that Southwest Airlines is the top-rated organization (no surprise there), followed by Mary Kay, General Mills and Slalom Consulting.
Here’s a feature I love. Glassdoor names names. At the end of 2009, Glassdoor listed the 25 companies with the lowest ratings (of those that had at least 25 ratings from U.S.-based employees within the past year). Guitar-maker Gibson Guitar was the worst-rated employer, followed by United Airlines (no surprise there) and staffing firm Spherion.
You might wonder why folks take the time to provide ratings of their employers. One of the major incentives that Glassdoor creates for doing so is that you have “to give to get.” In order to get the greatest level of inside detail, you have to provide information (fill out a survey) on your employer (or recent past employer).
Now a bit about Rich Barton, one of the founders of Glassdoor. I had the good fortune of doing a telephone interview with Rich for a book that I am writing (The Worthiness Era, or some such title) with several co-authors. I discovered Rich, who is also the CEO of Zillow, through Glassdoor. Zillow has incredibly high employee ratings, and so I called them up to ask for an interview with Rich. It was promptly and graciously granted, and talking with Rich was a true delight.
[Zillow is also a fascinating web site that you might want to check out, if you haven’t already done so. You can look up your house, or that of a friend or enemy, and get an estimate of its market value—along with square footage, number of bathrooms, etc.]
Rich is and has been a busy guy. In addition to being the Chair of the Board of Glassdoor, and the CEO of Zillow, he was a founder of Expedia. You may be beginning to see a pattern here. Rich’s purpose in life is to use technology to bring “power to the people.” He has the technology, the smarts, the vision, and the capital to do just that.
Transparency is here. It is real, it is unavoidable, and people love it.
Employers may try to resist, but there is no stopping this train. Firms will either learn to adapt and use transparency to their advantage, or not.
Tagged ranking companies, transparency
Grant RickettsMarch 2, 2010 at 4:15 am
Nice find, Laurie. As people learn where to find these ‘transparent’ sites, maybe our organizations will actually become more transparent. Good work!
Laurie BassiMarch 3, 2010 at 8:37 pmAuthor
I think we’re already well on our way to transparency. As we’re gathering evidence for our book (“Good Company”), we’re finding lots of examples of organizations bowing to pressure that transparency is creating.
TrishMarch 10, 2010 at 4:29 pm
What do you think the likelihood is that some of what you read on glassdoor.com is bunk. Either planted positive to help their own company, or planted negative to shine a poor light on competitors. After all, no one can validate that I really am who I say I am when I create my profile. Do you think people are generally mostly honest and sites like these can be trusted? Do you think that as they gain in popularity, the trustworthiness of the information found there necessarily decreases with the numbers of people using the resource?
Dan McMurrerMarch 11, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Great question by Trish, and an important issue not just for Glassdoor, but for all sites that are promoting greater transparency in the world.
Glassdoor describes a bit about their procedures for avoiding these problems (including email verification and human review of all postings) at http://www.glassdoor.com/about/learn.htm.
Almost certainly, despite those procedures, there’s probably still some small portion of what’s on glassdoor.com that’s deliberately inaccurate in some way. But in most cases, these are almost certainly outweighed by the much larger set of accurate information.
Nevertheless, any information source that depends on volunteer observations is absolutely subject to manipulation of the sort Trish describes.
And as the significance and visibility of sites like Glassdoor increases in future, they’ll need to ensure that the stringency of their validation processes keep up with the increased importance of the information they’re reporting.