The Ultimate Job Hunter’s Guide to Using Glassdoor
Part 1: Getting the most out of the company overview
Finding a new job isn’t just about convincing someone to hire you. It’s also about finding a company that matches your values, ethics, and work style. I’ve found Glassdoor to be a helpful resource for job hunters. It provides access to detailed employee reviews for thousands of companies worldwide.
It’s not a perfect website – after all, Glassdoor hosts job openings for these companies and can’t afford to alienate them – but it is a central repository of anonymous, raw employee feedback.
I’ve worked in toxic environments and it had a huge impact on my self esteem and mental health. Since then, I’ve tried to analyze Glassdoor reviews more closely to see if there are clues that people often miss.
It took me way too long before I stopped taking things at face value in job postings, employee reviews, and during interviews. While the opinions in this article are my own, I hope they can help you pick up clues that will land you at a company that treats you like a human, not an expendable work horse.
The Ultimate Job Hunter’s Guide to Using Glassdoor is a 3 part series
Part 1: Company overview – trends over time, ratings by demographics, and ratings for work/life balance, culture, senior management, and more.
Part 2: Employee reviews – weighing the value of a review, looking for consistent praise or criticism, and identifying emotionally loaded words and statements.
Part 3: Salaries, interviews, and benefits – filtering for your country or state and experience level, analyzing interview feedback, and reviewing benefits that are important to you.
You’ll notice that I haven’t included anything about job postings. I’ll cover this topic in an upcoming article about how job postings tell you more about the company culture than just the words on the page.
Before you can unlock access to most of the site, you will need to create a free account. Next, Glassdoor will ask you to leave a review for any company that you’ve worked for, past or present. Once you’re in, you’ll land on the home page which can direct you to discover and compare companies. For this guide, I’m only going to focus on specific company overview pages.
Part 1: Getting the Most out of a Company Overview
If you’re considering applying to a job opening, go straight to that company’s page. There is a surprising amount of information listed in the overview, including charts and aggregate scores. To find them, you’ll need to click on drop-down arrows that are not super noticeable in a casual scroll.
Company pages and overall trends
When you land on a company’s Glassdoor page, you’re presented with a list of categories to dive into. In this example, we’ll review Slack, a cloud collaboration platform.
The overview section is where Slack promotes itself to potential employees. Notice the Glassdoor Awards section, touting that Slack has a top CEO and is a “Best Place to Work.” This award is secured through positive responses on an employee survey. HR and recruitment teams are VERY invested in this award so they can attract talented job applicants.
The overview lists information like:
Whether a company is publicly traded or privately owned
Number of employees
National or global office locations
Industry
Founding date
Large companies have teams dedicated to creating content for sites like Glassdoor. Their main priority is to make the business sound amazing, regardless of employee feedback. Scrolling down the page shows you highlights on topics like diversity, company updates, photos, and FAQs. Small businesses and startups usually don’t have the time or funds for all this razzle dazzle on their overview pages.
Review ratings and trends
From here onward, I’ll be using examples from different companies and hiding their names. I’m NOT doing this to protect the companies – or to promote them. Rather, I want to highlight details that are important for job hunters, regardless of which employer page they’re visiting.
When you click into the ‘Reviews’ tab at the top of the page, you’ll see the overall rating and trends for a business. I see this as an extension of the company overview since it shows aggregate scores for various categories.
Some of the information, that you’ll definitely want to see, is kind of hidden. I’m not sure why Glassdoor doesn’t display it outright since tracking aggregate scores and trends over time seems like important data to me.
Next to the overall company rating is a drop down arrow.
Categories include:
Culture & Values
Diversity & Inclusion
Work/Life Balance
Senior Management
Compensation and Benefits
In this example, the employer has higher ratings for Work/Life Balance and Diversity & Inclusion categories, but falls behind in the Senior Management and Compensation & Benefits categories.
Which categories are most important to you?
If you need an environment in which you can be yourself at work, pay attention to Diversity & Inclusion.
If you’ve had a bad experience at a company with insensitive or unreliable senior management, make sure to find out more when reading reviews.
Perhaps you’re planning to grow your family. Check out the policy on parental leave and other family benefits.
For those with important non-work commitments, take note of work/life balance reviews.
If your past company had questionable values and you want to avoid that in your next role, make sure to consider Culture & Values.
Next to these categories you’ll find three more scores:
Recommend to a friend
Approve of CEO
Positive business outlook
If you want to be part of a company that is headed towards a profitable IPO, is respected in the industry, or has a strong leader, you’ll want to see high marks. I’ve personally worked at companies that I wouldn’t recommend to a friend for reasons like high stress, toxic management, low compensation, and poor work/life balance.
But if having a job where you’re given autonomy, and flexibility is your main priority, these numbers may or may not be as important to you.
Further down, you’ll see the overall trend over time and the distribution of ratings. I LOVE this section. Some companies go through peaks and troughs, while others consistently improve. Let’s look at a few examples:
Example 1:
At this company, reviews have been trending downwards for a while now. This may be due to a number of things, like how the company handles COVID-19, changes in leadership, or because the company is not performing well financially.
Before jumping to conclusions though, notice that their rating at the lowest point is 3.9 stars, which is pretty good compared to many companies, especially since the majority of their ratings are still 5 star reviews.
Use this data during your interviews!
Ask recruiters and hiring managers what has changed at the company that contributed to the decline in their score. Their answers can tell you a lot. They may give you a thorough answer explaining the initiatives they’ve recently launched to improve employee satisfaction.
Or, they’ll deflect and avoid answering. The recruiter could be brushing big problems under the rug. At the same time, don’t assume they have bad intentions. Maybe the hiring manager is feeling the low morale too but is very understaffed and desperate to hire someone to relieve pressure on all of their employees. Good managers get stuck in bad positions too. It’s still a possible red flag, of course. Dig in with more questions to understand the landscape.
Example 2:
This example is a bit of a head scratcher. On one hand, the trend is upwards. On the other, their top score is 3.7 and their rating distribution has a lot of 3 star and 4 star reviews.
Perhaps most employees feel that their job is fine – but not great. Maybe reviews say that the leadership team has no vision but their colleagues are wonderful to work with. A deeper look into individual reviews could flesh out these trends.
Example 3:
Here’s a company that shows consistency over time. The vast majority of ratings are 4 and 5 stars and they haven’t dropped below 4.3 in over a year. I feel confident that this company has a strong employee engagement plan and prioritizes employee satisfaction.
Ratings by Demographics
Interestingly, Ratings by Demographics is not available for every company on Glassdoor. That gives me a big... hmm… moment. Does Glassdoor hide this data for some companies? I don’t know the answer to this <shrug emoji>.
Here you can see overall ratings by these categories:
Race/Ethnicity
Gender
Sexual Orientation
Disability
Parent or Family Caregiver
Veteran Status
Demographics are self-reported and not everyone shares this information. Reasons range from concern that they’ll be easy to identify and targeted for their negative feedback, to a feeling that it’s not relevant to their experiences as an employee.
It’s a little hard to use this data in your decision making process. I wouldn’t rely on these ratings to be representative of the true demographic makeup of the company. But if any of these categories are important to you, these scores can help you identify trends within individual reviews later.
Takeaways
I can’t tell you if a company is the right fit for you. I can’t guarantee that my advice will help you avoid a bad manager. Glassdoor reviews can’t paint a full picture of a company and it’s employees.
But I can help you navigate Glassdoor and see all of the information it has to offer. Each of you will see this data differently because of your own unique experiences and risk tolerance. My hope is that you make the best decisions you can in your career with the information available.
Follow your instincts, ask lots of questions, and work for a company that treats you like a human being.
In Part 2, I’ll discuss how to connect these trends to individual employee reviews.
Cheers,
Tahera