Is Glassdoor a Platform for Corporate Cyberbullying

Is Glassdoor a Platform for Corporate Cyberbullying Ben Martinez is the VP for HR at HireVue and has some thoughts he wanted to share with us on the employer review site Glassdoor. Hes also passionate about great coffee which youll find out in this interview. Have a listen to our chat below, keep reading for a summary and dont forget to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast. A  corporate version of cyberbullying please explain? I shared on Facebook, Glassdoor is equivalent to the corporate version of cyberbullying. My point of that is the verification process  is  a mystery in terms of who can comment on your companys Glassdoor page. They can be a candidate, or they can claim to have worked at your company at some point and then decide to write a Glassdoor review. But its a mystery if they actually did work there. The reason why that becomes a problem is that you will have people thatll make a claim about your company that is without merit, and they will say something that is completely not true. Theres a completely other side of the story, but youre boxed into this corner of the comment on your page, and they become very hard to take off. I am all for good feedback and  saying how it is, but there are times where anybody could make a comment about your company, and then it can be not well  thought out. Sometimes, youre not even sure if the person actually worked there or even had an experience. It could be a troll out there bullying your company. Thats why I  call it the corporate version of cyberbullying. Somebody with ill intent could go after a company and really cause havoc for them without actually having a bad experience at that company. Is there any way to verify if someone was actually in employment or in a recruitment process? One of the verification methods is they require a company email. So  a current employee at that company  will  have to have the companys email to prove that they work there, which makes sense. But then the part that gets a little bit of a mystery is the former employees because they can just claim that they worked there. But to my knowledge, it does not match their LinkedIn or anything like that, or maybe the person does not have a LinkedIn. So they could just say that they did work there and maybe they did not work there, and they can make a claim. So  as it stands, we have comments on our Glassdoor where Im not 100% certain if that person actually ever worked there. They just made a comment about our company. Its not overly bad, but its not really a good one, and you just think, Well, Im not sure why this person feels that way So  where it becomes a mystery is the past employees and how they verify they actually work there. Can we really blame Glassdoor for this? If theres a negative review, if we deserved it, then give it to us. I think where Glassdoor could do a better job would be taking more accountability at verifying that the review came from an actual former employee. That way theres more truth to the whole process, and people can get a real view of what that is. Thats where I would put more accountability on their part. We had a candidate come in a few weeks back, and he made a claim on our Glassdoor page. He was here for probably three hours for an interview, and he made a claim. He called us white America, he made claims about us being racist, that we had a draconian work environment, and we only allowed 10-minute work breaks. This candidate was completely crazy. We get this thing on our Glassdoor page that gets sent out because a lot of our employees and customers follow our Glassdoor page. My team has to immediately look into this, and we get with Glassdoor, but it takes roughly seven days for them to take that comment down, which they did. They worked with us on that, but my point is that it was up there, and people saw it, and we took it down. And then theres a lot of chatter in the office about, Wow. What was that review about? Why does it work well employers like  HomeServe and LOréal and not so well for others? We  dont do the paid version of Glassdoor, and it still has worked well for us. We take a lot of pride in our Glassdoor page, and thats probably why I get so passionate about it. How it works well for other companies is first of all, youve got to complete the profile out about your page be as transparent as you can about sharing everything. But youve got to respond and be authentic in your responses, because people can see through that. As you do this, you expect some bad reviews and take it as feedback. Weve had reviews where it was our bad, and we did not treat the candidate right in the experience so  we apologized on there. Weve even sent some candidates a little package, our apologies on your experience. Then weve had the really good examples that you get out there where people give rave reviews, and theyre really a big fan of what you do. How these companies have been successful is, it will never be as awesome as the page reveals itself to be, and it  will never  be as bad as the pages reveals itself to be. Somewhere, theres a middle ground, and I think that these companies are just real in how they respond to these questions and what they say about it.  If you get a bad one, just own up to it, Yep, that was our bad, and we apologize for how we treated you in that process, Then the ones that deserve a better response, if it wasnt your bad then I think its okay to stick up for yourself. Ive had a good experience with Glassdoor and how theyve approached us with it. Obviously, they want our business, but they do tend to take an approach of, Heres your information. If you want to do something more with it, you have to give us money. but our score is 4.5 out of 5. Theres not a lot they can really say that will  make a difference. Im not opposed to paying, but were a smaller, mature startup. We dont have a lot of budget. Amazon  have  a score of 3.5, Uber have  a score of 4.1, HireVue  are on 4.5, any comments on that? Amazon:  In the last year or two its declined a lot. Probably because a while back, there were letters going around about the way they were treating the employees. And there was something around being unfair towards women. On  a scale of 1 to 5, 3.5 isnt awful, but its not awesome. You do have to look at how big that company is too, but theres definitely room for improvement. Uber:  Considering what theyve gone through; all the sexual harassment stuff, and toxic work problems, with 4.1 maybe theres something good going on there still that the press is not focusing on.  Its easy to get reactions out of the bad stuff. So 4.1 is still pretty good, especially considering what theyve gone through. HireVue:  So we were at 4.8. Thats why  I got hot on some of these reviews. The reason why weve declined, is because of  a natural change. We have a new CEO, and hes great, but when you get a leadership change, you  will get  people who are good with a change, and people who are bad with the change. I think that change drove our score down a little bit. Are there any other alternatives for employees wanting some transparency about the experience of working there? The one we use a lot is called Comparably, think of it in a similar fashion as Glassdoor, except you can rate the CEO, you can rate the company, and you can do a lot of things in terms of rating. What I like about it, is it breaks it down into an individual level, with more diversity. So you can find out the percentage of people who rate your CEO who are female.  Maybe they rate your CEO, they really like him, and its 95%. But  maybe the men dislike him, and its 58%. Obviously Im making these numbers up, but I like it. It gives you  a deeper look than Glassdoor. It  does a good job of focusing on the diversity of how things are being rated. The comments are not as anonymous. You can still get really good feedback, but they can be really targeted at areas you can improve, versus someone just randomly making a comment about how bad your coffee is in the workplace. Were 92/100 executive rating, 98 quality of coworkers, 96 for future outlook, so  were in a good place. What do you think is next for Glassdoor and employee review sites? Theyre getting a lot of data and a lot of insight thats just continually building. There are still companies that are sending out the annual employment surveys and engagement surveys. I think whats next is they can turn this into an ongoing engagement tool where they can start to get a real-time pulse of how a company is doing, what people really think real-time.  Theyre collecting real  data from people who is always ongoing, versus the company-administered survey that becomes  static. Thats where they will use this data for a lot of other things. LinkedIns now been acquired by Microsoft, but I see  LinkedIn and Glassdoor  being able to play really well together.  I know they used to not like each other for a while, but thats been four or five years back now. They are both in the same area, and they hold a lot of data about employees, so theres a lot of stuff you can share. Follow Ben on  Twitter  @benmartinezJ.