Employee company reviews: Explore Top Companies Reviews and Ratings Direct from Employees

What You Can Learn From Company Reviews

Company culture: two words that hold a lot of weight and can be the difference in making or breaking your professional happiness. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but the truth is, there’s a lot more than salary and title to consider. Not only do you need to be qualified for positions you’re applying to, but you also need to be a good fit. Hiring managers care about this, but so should you, the job seeker—and getting a sense of the culture isn’t as straightforward as learning how much money’s on the table and what your business card will say.

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Gone are the days of simply applying for a job, going on an interview, and receiving an offer. Before you tailor your resume and cover letter for a specific role, you’re probably researching the company, doing a little LinkedIn browsing, and maybe even checking out a few current employees’ social media accounts. And you’re also most likely reading company reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.

It’s kind of genius: You get the dirt—and the glitz—from people with first-hand experience. No interviewer’s going to tell you that the company has had a problem with cliques or that the unlimited vacation policy is actually discouraged, but an anonymous employee sure will. While getting a decent picture of an organization involves plenty of weeding through (especially if there are a lot of reviews) there’s undoubtedly a lot to be gained by taking the time to figure out what the place is like based on people on the inside.

Once you get going perusing the reviews, you can usually start to tell the difference between a person who intends for his commentary to be productive and useful versus the person who just has a lot of anger and frustration and has decided to spit it up online. Muse Career Coach, Adrian J. Hopkins, says that “It’s good to take all reviews with a grain of salt.”

And while you’d be short-sighted to base your decision solely on this type of anonymous forum, you’d do well to arm yourself with info on how to read the reviews, what to look for, and what else you can do when you’re seeing feedback that makes you uncomfortable

How it Works

If you’ve ever taken the time to discuss your experience at a company on Indeed, you might like to know that all reviews are moderated with a combination of “machine-learning trained algorithms and human moderators,” according to Andrew McGlinchey, Product Management Director at Indeed. McGlinchey says that the company, which has over 10 million reviews posted on the site, “wants to ensure that job seekers looking at company reviews are seeing authentic and honest assessments.”

If you’re a job seeker, you obviously want to get as comprehensive a picture as you can about a company. You might like to know that both Indeed and Glassdoor take the reviews seriously. Each has a community guidelines section, and if you wish to post a review on the latter, you must have a permanent, active email address or a valid social networking account.

Samantha Zupan, Glassdoor spokesperson explains that “Reviews are subject to a multi-tier review process that includes technological and human review. If a piece of content submitted to Glassdoor warrants additional review, we have a full team of content moderators to ensure the content meets the community guidelines and terms of use.”

In spite of these measures, it’s not impossible to come across a review from a disgruntled former employee. These individuals, so long as they’re following the outlined guidelines, are entitled to report back on a terrible year at Company X. If someone found the frat-party atmosphere pervasive at Company P, she can certainly write about that—hopefully, she’s doing it because she thinks it’s an important piece of information for the prospective employee, and not just because she’s annoyed that the organization prioritized social functions when she’d have preferred better equipment. Regardless of a reviewer’s M.O., as Zupan points out, “It’s also important to keep in mind that reviews are people’s opinions.”

As such, employers have an opportunity to respond as well—so long as they too obey the posting stipulations. Explains McGlinchey, “We do offer a way for employers to respond to reviews that they think need clarification or that they disagree with.”

This seems fair, but what about big, powerful companies posting fake reviews? After all, it’s not that hard to create a fake email address and verify it. Then, HR personnel can write up glowing reviews in response to a negative one. But McGlinchey said that they haven’t seen an issue with this. Neither has Zupan (or if she has, she’s not saying). Instead, she offers the following, “Glassdoor takes the integrity of its content and community seriously.” She goes on to say that the company offers any user, “be it a job seeker or an employer, the ability to flag reviews that they feel does not fit the Glassdoor community. ”  

How to Read Reviews

Besides the obvious ones—spurned former employees, not a good enough sample size, subjective—company reviews, while valuable, come up short filling in the big picture. Peter Phelan, Founder and CEO of ValuesCulture, a company that strives to help other organizations make smart hiring decisions with respect to culture, isn’t opposed to reviews, but he notes the likelihood of negative reviews.

You may pride yourself on writing the occasional glowing review on TripAdvisor or Open Table, but more often than not, if you’re in the habit of offering online feedback that’s anonymous, you’re probably more eager to do so when you have a complaint. That’s an important point to keep in mind as you dive in.

Look for themes. If enough reviews tell you to “steer clear” or “stay away” that might not be something you want to ignore. On the other hand, reading a few reviews that claim the CEO’s a terrible human being and the company’s going downhill fast shouldn’t be sufficient info for you to abandon the position you’re seeking there if you haven’t gotten that impression.

Just don’t forget to keep an eye out for small details, especially as they pertain to things you’re seeking or those you can do without:

• Do the most recent ones seem positive, on an upturn swing from reviews posted over a year ago?
• Was there a change in leadership?
• Did the company change its mission or rebrand itself?
• Are a lot of the reviews complaining about the lack of perks?
• Is a loaded snack closet even something you care about?
• Is there a pattern of complaints about too many young managers?
• Are you fresh out of college and OK with having a supervisor two years older than you?
• Is there a heavy social culture, and is that something you’re actively seeking?

Depending on the perspective, criteria, and agenda of the reader, the review may look quite different. Let’s take a look at a real review below (important details hidden for privacy purposes).

The title of the review has the potential to immediately turn off non-Millennial candidates, whereas others may become even more attracted after seeing that. Either way, reading on’s important because a four-word heading isn’t enough to judge a company by. The reviewer mentions that the company is an industry leader that’s growing. The workplace, according to this current employee who’s been there for more than one year, is diverse. He or she seems to support and believe in the brand, but clearly the overriding issues he or she sees—“bro culture,” “age bias”—are felt strongly enough for the reviewer to have only a neutral outlook and state that he or she “doesn’t recommend” the workplace.

There’s some interesting information to be gleaned here, especially because someone at the organization responded, encouraging the dissatisfied employee to connect with someone on the human resources team to discuss ways of enhancing the culture. That said, there’s still a ton that a candidate can’t learn from these paragraphs.

While a “tech bro culture” doesn’t sound great at all, there’s such a thing called fit, and sometimes someone who discovers a place of employment isn’t a good fit for him will be quick to criticize the organization instead of considering that it just might not be right for him. A person who cares about diversity may zero in on that detail and ignore the “room for improvement” note. Anyway, it’s a rare place of employment that can’t stand to improve on some level, right?

How to Use the Reviews in an Interview

Career Coach Hopkins believes you can leverage the information in the reviews and use it to ask pointed questions during an interview. He suggests going ahead and reading reviews to learn about the company’s culture and ethos and then developing “nuanced questions to help you find answers. For example, rather than asking your directly about the company’s allegedly poor work-life balance, ask them instead about what activities they’re involved in outside of the office. You’re more likely to get a genuine answer that’s more useful than a canned, ‘We have a great work-life balance!’ response that can still leave you suspicious.”

You can ask about the CEO’s involvement without saying that you read a lot of dissatisfied reviews claiming her total lack of it. Watch for facial expressions—they can sometimes be the dead giveaway in a situation like this.

And if you go in for an interview before your discovery that the company only rewards people who kiss up to management, you can take your questions elsewhere. Phelan’s a big proponent of the out-of-office meeting. It’s not always the easiest thing to navigate, but if you really want to get an idea of what’s going on behind those closed doors, consider reaching out to a current employee and setting up a coffee meeting.

It’s great to have access to individuals’ reviews of current and past employers, and it’s somewhat comforting to know that this feedback’s monitored and nice to know that the employer can respond, but it’s still a very limited way to gain insight. While your hope is that you’ll join a company where everyone’s happy and fulfilled and a perfect fit, it’s unrealistic that every single person’s going to be satisfied.

The reasons for a disgruntled reviewer can vary—maybe Leslie is on sales and quietly dreams of being a writer, or maybe Aaron on IT is envious of the dev team’s exciting programming projects, perhaps Felicia’s email to the CEO was never answered and she developed a grudge because of the oversight, or Jake’s proposal to increase the social budget got rejected—and it’s impossible to know if someone took to the online forum to complain purely because he needed an outlet for his frustration.

On the flipside, overwhelmingly positive reviews can only reveal so much as well. Taking everything you read at face value fails to consider underlying factors, such as a person’s recent promotion, or a talent recruiter’s glowing review in an effort to draw more interest to open positions.

Taking the reviews with a grain of salt, as Hopkins suggests, and exploring as many other ways as possible to get a feel for a company before you apply or accept an offer is not only the smart thing to do, it’s also the professional thing to do.

Photo of woman reading reviews courtesy of Hero Images/Getty Images.

Why Employee Reviews Are Critical to Your Brand Management Efforts

The practice of collecting, analyzing, addressing, and learning from employee reviews is critical to your brand management strategy. Potential employees, customers, business partners, and investors will use employee reviews to form an opinion of your business and decide whether to work with you.

“Employee reviews play a critical role in a company’s employer brand perception and ability to attract quality talent,” Kaitlyn Holbein, founder and principal consultant at recruitment marketing and employer branding firm The Employer Brand Shop, says. “While your careers site and social media profiles can provide some information, candidates really want to hear about your culture and employee experience directly from people like them—from your current and past employees. Anonymous review sites are an ideal place for candidates to really understand your employee experience from a perspective they can trust.”

Customers and potential hires demand visibility into your business

Treating your employees well is just the right thing to do. And more and more, your clients and customers will demand that you not only treat your employees well, but that your efforts to do so and the effects are transparent and visible.

The Accenture’s 2018 Strategy Global Consumer Pulse Research found:

• 65 percent of consumers say they are attracted to organizations that treat their employees well.

• 74 percent of consumers say they crave greater transparency in how companies ensure safe working conditions.

• 36 percent of consumers have been disappointed by the way a company acted, which betrayed consumers’ belief in what the company stands for, and 47 percent stopped doing business with the company as a result.

Your hiring and retention also depend on good, informative employee reviews. A 2017 study by iCIMS titled “The Modern Job Seeker” found:

• Nearly 1 in 3 workers have declined a job offer primarily because the company had negative online employer reviews.

• 92 percent of working Americans consider employee reviews to be important when deciding to apply to a job.

• 43 percent of managerial-level workers have declined a job offer because of poor reviews, compared to 17 percent for non-management candidates.

• 47 percent of millennials have declined a job offer because of negative reviews online.

• It only takes 10 reviews for a consumer to trust the information.

A 2020 Jobvite survey found:

And according to Glassdoor:

• 40 percent of job seekers say they would pull out of a recruitment process after reading negative reviews from employees.

• 33 percent of job seekers say they would pull out after hearing about employee or leadership scandals.

Encourage your employees to rate you, regularly

Don’t wait for your team to rate you; invite them to rate your company, and do it often. Your brand management efforts are ongoing and so should your efforts to understand the experience of your workers.

“In order to manage their employer brand effectively on anonymous review sites like InHerSight, Glassdoor, or Comparably, employers need to get involved in the conversation,” Holbein says. “They can do so by encouraging employees to leave honest reviews on a regular basis, responding to reviews that come in, acting on feedback, and sending candidates to these platforms to learn more during the hiring process.”

Keeping your data fresh with new and regular ratings and reviews means you have an up-to-date understanding of your company culture. Encourage your employees to rate every six to 12 months to capture the effects of management changes, shifts in culture, and general policy changes. Additionally, you can ask your employees to rate specific aspects of your business three to six months after a major change in benefits or policy so you can measure its effects on employee satisfaction.

But anonymity is key

Employees will be able to be most honest about their experience working for your company when the review is 1) anonymous and 2) collected by a third party.

Don’t expect workers to provide candid advice unless they know their identities and jobs are safe.

According to a June 2020 survey by InHerSight, 49 percent of women say they are able to be completely honest in an employer review if the employer is the one collecting it, while 81 percent they can be completely honest if a third-party is collecting it.

Holbein: “Companies that adopt this approach demonstrate that they are transparent and ethical employers. These actions show candidates that the employer isn’t hiding anything and thus reduces the risk factors associated with a big life decision like a career change. Managing your employee review site presence as part of your overall brand management strategy provides a major leg up in attracting the most qualified and highest performing talent on the market.”

The goal is to listen, not to control

The goal of playing an active role in the employee review process is not to control the story, it’s to listen to the story. No matter how you feel about culture, benefits, and policies, your employees are the most accurate source of information about what it’s really like to work at your business.

Your role as employer is to listen and act. Employee ratings and reviews, and their trends over time,to create better workplaces for your workforce.

Don’t be afraid of the less-than-positive reviews, learn from them

You need to know what your employees think about working at your company. Whether the experience is good or bad, you need to know. Especially the bad. Negative or less-than-positive reviews from employees are your chance to identify areas for improvement and act.

“Employee reviews are important to improving your company culture because they can provide a feedback loop that helps you to continually improve on elements of your employee experience over time,” Holbein says.

Read more: How to Make Your Company Shine on InHerSight

Simply the act of asking for honest feedback and giving employees a safe and anonymous way to share their experience can signal brand trustworthiness. “When employees see you responding to reviews, it sends an important signal about the type of open workplace you’re looking to foster that improves your perceived culture and employer brand.”

But that trust will be broken unless you listen and act. “Reviews only improve your actual (rather than perceived) culture over time if you create a dedicated schedule for reading and responding to feedback, reviewing themes with HR and leadership, and then creating action plans to address any negative comments or patterns.”

Employee reviews are a critical part of SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is part of any strong brand management strategy.

Your ability to “take up space” on page one of Google for your branded search terms means that you’ll need to manage your brand beyond the domains you own. Search terms that include your brand name, like “working at Company X” or “Company X jobs,” or even simply “Company X,” can return a results page that includes employee reviews on a third-party site.

You won’t have a lot of control over whether these pages show up when users search for your brand. What you will be able to control is how you respond to the reviews, what you do with the feedback, and if you’ve listened well—how those ratings and reviews trend over time.

Another way to manage your reputation on these review sites is to claim your profiles. On most review sites, this gives you the ability to upload images, link social media accounts, and ensure information about the company is accurate and up to date.

About our source

Kaitlyn Holbein is the founder and principal consultant at The Employer Brand Shop, a boutique recruitment marketing and employer branding agency. Holbein and her team help organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.

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5 employee review sites about employers you need to know

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You are communicating with a candidate. The conversation looks quite adequate. And it seems to you that the interlocutors parted, pleased with each other. But the appointment did not take place: the candidate for some reason refused. Didn’t say the reason. However, he wrote a negative review about the company on one of the Internet resources.

This should be treated calmly. The easiest way to throw out the negative of a disgruntled person is to turn to the keyboard and the Internet. At the same time, the writer is sure that in this way he will take revenge on the offender, “dishonoring him to the whole world.” Often it’s unfair.

Check out these sites with reviews about employers more often. There you can read a lot of interesting things about the company, and not only from applicants for open positions, but also from retired employees. This sometimes gives valuable information and stimulates development.

Potok experts offer to get acquainted with 5 such sites. Remember that published reviews about the company are often unfair and subjective. But all of them, to one degree or another, provide information for reflection.

Contains two sections: Job Seekers and Employers. The interface is clear and convenient. The list contains more than 30 thousand companies and 330 thousand responses. There is a rating of “Best Employers”. In the rubrication, you can look at reviews about the work of competitors, and this is always interesting.

Reviews are given on five indicators that form the rating of companies. Points are affixed from 1 to 5:
– salary,
– boss,
– team,
– workplace,
– career.

Many sensible and detailed comments on various aspects of the work. For example, you can see the level of salaries in different companies.

The Dream Job widget with ratings and reviews about companies is placed on the largest Russian resource HH.ru, including on job pages, and contains:
– rating of the company on a scale from 1 to 5 points;
– percentage of employees who recommend this employer;
– employee reviews.

Information available only to authorized users.

The site was launched in 2015. More than 800 thousand visitors per month. Simple search interface, no registration. On the first page, you will see reviews of frequently discussed companies in the form of a bulletin board. Be prepared: you will be met with a flurry of negativity: about the dishonesty of employers, about cheating in paying salaries, about the “terrible treatment” of employees.

Reviews of organizations are grouped by industry: construction, medicine, transport, etc. You can search by city. Opinion about the company is proposed to be filled in two windows: pluses and minuses. The geography of participants is wide: Russia, the Near Abroad, China, the United Arab Emirates.

There is a “Rating of companies that can cheat.” True, the authors of the site admit that positive reviews can be boosted with the help of hired agencies. However, if you find your company among the hundreds of scammers, it’s worth seeing if there is any truth in it.

Contains information on more than 100 thousand companies and has more than half a million reviews. The site is distinguished by a convenient search form in which you select a country and also indicate the name of the company.

Interesting headings, which include 25 “outstanding employers”:
– companies that are most written about,
– companies that are viewed the most,
– the lowest and highest ratings.

The authors of the site consider their project to be a “bright representative of freedom of speech”, not subject to outside influence. I am glad that profanity is not indexed by search engines. Each review can be commented on.

Contains a black list of employers, and more. Portal vc.ru calls this site a virtual trade union. The authors position themselves as “a place for propaganda of ‘direct action’” in resolving labor conflicts – as opposed to the judicial and bureaucratic system”, and also claim that “thanks to antijob.net, more than a dozen workers received a salary after publishing a review on the site, because many employers are afraid to get on our site.”

The number of visitors per year is about 2.5 million. The site receives 6,000 responses. Only half of them are moderated and published. To stop the filling of the portal with purchased responses, the administration introduced categories: certified, trusted and anonymous.

Considered an authoritative international resource. Created in 2008. Glassdoor operates as part of Recruit Holdings’ growing HR technology business segment. Registration is required to access data.

Contains reviews of 600,000 companies. There are more than 1000 reviews per employer. The rating consists of ratings:

– values ​​and corporate culture;
– work-life balance;
– top management;
– wages + bonuses;
– career growth.

Key characteristics of the site: 54 million visitors per month, 110 million reviews, 2.1 million employers. Designed for those who are looking for work abroad. It’s also of interest to those looking for employee experience information based on millions of company ratings and reviews, payroll reports, benefits reviews, and more.

Hundreds of thousands of comments about companies are collected here. Bad and good. You will find out what former applicants think about how the interview goes, about salary, about privileges, about the pros and cons of the job.

Ratings and comments add up to a specific company rating with a maximum of 5 stars. True, almost no company has such an assessment here. The more reviews, the more reliable the image of the company appears.

How to deal with negative feedback?

You can’t avoid them, no matter how hard you try. But something can be done.

1. Strengthen alternative company information. Write about yourself as often as possible so that negative resource pages move down in the search results.
2. Work with negative feedback to neutralize it. Do it promptly. A professional and persuasive answer will benefit more than the negativity itself. If you are not ready to work with reviews, you can outsource reputation management.
3. Remember that there are sites with a lot of fakes that the authors of the resource offer the employer to remove for a certain amount of money. Whether it is worth paying – decide for yourself. You create the image of the company yourself. And the reputation depends on how you work with employees. Mistakes lower your reputation. Correcting a negative opinion is much more difficult than building a positive image of the company.
4. Don’t forget that no one has canceled work with staff satisfaction. To get started, find out how many of your employees are satisfied with the company and start improving performance.

To do this, research the opinions of employees and candidates, and it is better to start doing this at the stage of hiring. Potok Recruitment is a universal recruitment automation platform that allows you to integrate surveys into the process of working with candidates.

When can the survey be launched:

– when a vacancy is closed for the candidate and process participants;
– when a candidate is transferred to a certain stage of the funnel or in case of refusal;
– for the candidate and the hiring manager after a period of time after being hired.

Get feedback from everyone involved in the recruitment process, speed up hiring and improve quality.

Depending on the configured rules, the survey starts automatically: you do not need to connect additional services. Each survey is related to a specific job, recruiter, or candidate, so you don’t have to ask about it separately. The results are accumulated in Potok: just download an Excel spreadsheet with data to easily organize and analyze it.

Reduce the manual work of collecting feedback and improve the process based on data!

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