Glassdoor — A Flawed Weapon For The Modern Recruiter

Headquartered in California since 2007, Glassdoor managed to quickly secure its place as the global leader in offering insights on companies and open positions.

Offering reviews and ratings on companies, CEOs, salary reports, interview assessments, as well as job postings, Glassdoor strives to create accurate images of employers.

For recruiters, it can be an excellent tool for understanding the inside culture of companies and who works for them. However, it is not the perfect tool, as we’ll find out later on.

The unique thing about Glassdoor is that the insights come from current and former employees, as well as candidates in the interviewing process. Thus, it attempts to provide an internal glimpse and a more personal assessment of companies.

This personal assessment can be vital info for a clued-in recruiter. Most importantly, it can help you find disgruntled or jaded employees who would be keen and willing to interview for your open positions.

Why is Glassdoor Relevant?

As a job-seeker, you can use Glassdoor to find and make decisions on your future employer or candidates by checking out unique perspectives on:

• Diversity & Inclusion
• Management style
• Internal struggles
• Business forecasts
• Available benefits
• Recruitment quality
• Company culture

In addition, by leaving a salary review of your current company, you will automatically access all the salary insights available on Glassdoor. Through salary insights, you can assess the fairness of your future and even your current salary.

However, Glassdoor can be interpreted not only by candidates, but also potential clients, recruiters, internal employees, as well as the company management.

This is where Glassdoor can get interesting — you as an outside member can get a candid insight into the actual nature of a company along with excellent data such as salaries, work culture, and managerial style.

Glassdoor’s Importance to Recruiters

1. Decision-Making

As a recruiter, you can use the insights to see a company’s shortcomings and capitalise on finding the employees that are underserved or undervalued. Insights on salaries, the benefits system, policies on diversity and inclusion, as well as management style can be vital information that can be used to highlight the strengths of the job/company you’re promoting.

In addition, positive insights on other companies can equip a recruiter with unique information that can be used to make suggestions to the management of their company in order to attract better candidates and even increase retention — e.g. readjusting benefits system, integrating recruitment training, as well as off-boarding techniques.

Glassdoor can be an excellent starting point for learning about the true nature of a company — if the data is there.

2. Employer Branding

Having positive reviews and high ratings (as well as the CEO and management) can provide a sense of legitimacy and trust to a company — especially when entering new markets where Glassdoor is more popular (e.g. USA).

For embedded recruitment companies such as ACELR8, Glassdoor insights on recruitment processes can provide a unique opportunity to showcase the quality of the service they provide.

Additionally, it helps us learn where companies are succeeding and failing, giving us a better insight into possible systems or organisational structures that we could implement (or avoid).

3. Improving the Score

The best method companies use to improve their Glassdoor score is to tackle the often-mentioned issues in the reviews. In order to achieve that, first and foremost, it’s important to keep track of the reviews consistently.

As a recruiter, this can be an excellent insight into the nature of a company and if employees are ready to jump ship.

For example, if a particular criticism keeps recurring and makes up a significant portion of the reviews, chances are it’s something that the management must capitalise and work on.

To further prove the relevance of a review, it’s also a possible idea to reach out to the anonymous reviewer, suggest a private discussion, and hear them out.

The Downsides of Glassdoor

Glassdoor has a number of limitations that are important to keep in mind when investigating a company.

First off, it’s not widely used in a lot of locations. It may be helpful for US-based and many European companies, but it falls short in other locations. Additionally, it’s important to remember that people are much more likely to leave negative reviews than positive ones — this can often skew the image of the company and how large their problems may be.

If you’re looking at a smaller business, the data may be quite limited, again leading to a reduced perspective on the actual nature of the company. Other data limitations, such as a lack of barriers to entry, outdated insights, and changed information, can all lead to a skewed view of the business.

So, does this mean Glassdoor is useless?

Not necessarily.

To Glassdoor, or not to Glassdoor?

As mentioned above, there are a number of ways Glassdoor can be utilised by recruiters, but the limitations are there and they’re quite strong. This often becomes the reason why individuals, as well as companies, choose not to utilise Glassdoor insights.

Surely, it’s hard to ignore the limitations. But, on the other hand, we might be missing out on some unique company insights. In my opinion, the limitations of Glassdoor shouldn’t discourage people from using it, but rather become a reason to interpret the insights with a grain of salt.

Glassdoor’s reviews are written by people and it’s always important to remember that people’s opinions are subjective. A review may point you in the right direction, but it’s best to see it as a starting point of research rather than the final proof.

It’s important to keep in mind that while Glassdoor is extremely flawed and is a shadow of the ideal that it promises, it’s still undoubtedly the leader on employee-candidate insights and, for the time being, the best we have.

Therefore, through thoroughly inspecting the reviews while remaining completely aware of the limitations, we can fathom the full potential that Glassdoor insights offer.