Ratings for companies: Overview of BBB Ratings | Better Business Bureau®

Overview of BBB Ratings | Better Business Bureau®

BBB ratings represent the BBB’s opinion of how the business is likely to interact with its customers. The BBB rating is based on information BBB is able to obtain about the business, including complaints received from the public. BBB seeks and uses information directly from businesses and from public data sources.

BBB assigns ratings from A+ (highest) to F (lowest). In some cases, BBB will not rate the business (indicated by an NR, or “No Rating”) for reasons that include insufficient information about a business or ongoing review/update of the business’s file.

BBB Business Profiles generally explain the most significant factors that raise or lower a business’s rating.

BBB ratings are not a guarantee of a business’s reliability or performance. BBB recommends that consumers consider a business’s BBB rating in addition to all other available information about the business.

Customer Reviews are not used in the calculation of the BBB Letter Grade Rating.

RATING ELEMENTS

BBB ratings are based on information in BBB files with respect to the following factors:

1.   Business’s complaint history with BBB.

The BBB rating takes into account the following information with respect to closed complaints that relate to a business’s marketplace activities:

• Number of complaints filed with BBB against the business.
• The size of the business.
• If complaints have been filed, whether in BBB’s opinion the business appropriately responded to them.
• If complaints have been filed, whether in BBB’s opinion the business resolved the complaints in a timely manner to the customer’s satisfaction.
• If complaints have been filed, whether in BBB’s opinion the business made a good faith effort to resolve complaints, even if the customer was not satisfied with the resolution.
• If complaints have been filed, whether in BBB’s opinion the business failed to resolve the underlying cause(s) of a pattern of complaints.
• The age of resolved complaints. Older resolved complaints have less of an impact on the rating than newer complaints.

BBB analysis of a business’s complaint history generally takes into account the business’s size if BBB has reliable information to establish its size. If BBB cannot reliably determine business size, it will consider the business to fall within BBB’s smallest size category.

2.   Type of business.

A business’s BBB rating is lowered if, in BBB’s opinion, the business is a type of business that raises marketplace concerns or is believed to operate in violation of the law.

3.   Time in business.

A business’s BBB rating is based, in part, on the length of time the business has been operating. If BBB is unable to obtain, from the business or from other sources, information about time in business that BBB deems reliable, BBB will consider business to have started at the time BBB opened its file on the business.

4.   Transparent Business Practices.

A business’s BBB rating is lowered if BBB determines that the business is not being transparent about its marketplace conduct. This includes situations where:

• A business does not provide complete information about products and services offered, and/or ownership.
• A business uses false addresses or an address cannot be determined.

5.   Failure to honor commitments to BBB.

A business’s BBB rating is lowered if a business does not honor its commitments to BBB, including commitments to abide by a mediation settlement or an arbitration award.

6.   Licensing and government actions known to BBB.

A business’s BBB rating is lowered when BBB has knowledge of the following:

• Failure of the business to have required competency licensing (i.e., licensing that requires a competency assessment or can be taken away based on misconduct by business).
• Finalized government actions against the business that relate to its marketplace activities and, in BBB’s opinion, raise questions about the business’s ethics or its reliability in providing products/services. Government action deductions consider several factors including how the case is finalized as well as the amount of restitution, penalties or fines imposed against the business. However, older government actions have less of an impact than newer government actions of the same type.

BBB routinely checks required competency licensing and government actions before a business is accredited by BBB. BBB does not routinely check required competency licensing and government actions for businesses that do not seek BBB accreditation, although in some cases BBB learns of these matters through its marketplace research.

7.   Advertising issues known to BBB.

A business’s BBB rating is lowered when the business does not, in BBB’s opinion, appropriately respond to BBB advertising challenges that relate to:

• Misuse of the BBB name or BBB marks; or
• Questions about the truthfulness, accuracy or substantiation of advertising claims or compliance with the BBB Code of Advertising. Advertising issues may be rated as major, moderate or minor, and the rating deduction varies accordingly.

BBB advertising challenges are made at BBB’s discretion when it receives complaints from consumers or competitors about advertising or when BBB identifies questionable advertising through its monitoring of local media.

RATING POINTS

This chart shows the maximum number of points that can be earned or deducted in each element of the BBB rating system. A business’s total score is on a 100 point scale. Please note there are some categories in which businesses can only lose points, and for those categories a “0” is indicated as the maximum number of points that can be awarded.

Overview of rating points

Number	Element	Range of points that can be earned or deducted (maximum to minimum)
1.	Complaint Volume (Weighted by Complaint Age)	15 to 0
2.	Unanswered Complaints	40 to 0
3.	Unresolved Complaints	30 to 0
4.	Complaint Resolution Delayed	5 or 0
5.	Failure to Address Complaint Pattern	0 to -31
6.	Type of Business	0 to -41
7.	Time in Business	10 to 0
8.	Transparent Business Practices	0 or -5
9.	Failure to Honor Mediation/Arbitration	0 to -41
10.	Competency Licensing	0 or -41
11.	Government Action (per action)	0 to -34
12.	Advertising Review (per incident)	0 to -41
13.	BBB Trademark Infringement	0 or -41

LETTER RATING SCALE

This is the 100 point scoring scale BBB uses to assign letter grade ratings:

Overview of letter grade scale

From	To	Letter Rating
97	100	A+
94	96. 99	A
90	93.99	A-
87	89.99	B+
84	86.99	B
80	83.99	B-
77	79.99	C+
74	76.99	C
70	73.99	C-
67	69.99	D+
64	66.99	D
60	63.99	D-
0	59.99	F

11 Sites Where You Can Find Employee Reviews (Besides Fairygodboss)

Employer reviews and employee review sites are an invaluable resource for job-seekers.

If you’re looking for a job and wondering what it’s like to work at a prospective company, you should take advantage of all the places online where you can hear from employees leaving user reviews of their workplaces. Gone are the days when you only heard a one-way message from the employers themselves within employee performance reviews.

Of course, if you have a personal connection with someone you trust who works at a company, you might wonder whether you still need to look at employee reviews. The answer may be personal and depending on the relationship you have with this contact, but at the same time, it can’t hurt to get a sense of what others say. If for no other reason than to assess morale and the overall feeling of others you’ll be working with, it’s helpful to get a sense of what other people are saying. Moreover, there are certain situations where your contact may know less about what it’s like to work in a particular department or within a certain functional area and a job review can help you fill out missing details from a single third-person account. (In the case of Fairygodboss, you may want to hear from a particular group of people specifically, e.g. women or other minority groups of employees).

Regardless of how extensively you rely on employee reviews, job reviews are clearly a win for employees who are trying to understand an employer’s culture, employer brand, whether their compensation and pay are fair, and learn about human resources benefits and company policies. We believe in transparency at Fairygodboss, and believe that job candidates should do their part before entering an employer-employee relationship by doing their homework.

You may be thinking to yourself that since a job review from an employee is anonymous, perhaps it isn’t trustworthy. Certainly, there’s no way to verify the identities of people on employee review sites and how credible individual job reviews are. Employer review websites may not be perfect but if a website employes a human-review process for a user-generated content and their process for content moderation and evaluation is rigorous, fake reviews will be rare.

Another reaction you may intuitively have about employee review sites is that the human resources department must frown upon using them. However, that’s probably no longer the case at a majority of companies. The HR department has gotten used to the fact that they cannot control what employees say online about their jobs (whether through employee review site or simply on their social media profiles or personal blogs). Some HR professionals even appreciate the transparency in helping their employer brand or to receive employee feedback that’s candid.

Ultimately, the power of information on the internet allows employees to understand what they’re getting into when they are applying for employment at a new firm, interviewing and accepting a job offer. Job seekers should use all available resources in order to make decisions about where they will find the best job-fit.

Fairygodboss

First, take a look at the reviews available on Fairygodboss, where we aggregate women’s opinions and workplace experiences like so:

Overall Company Reviews. In addition to aggregating female employees’ overall job satisfaction levels, we provide a summary of whether women think their company treats men and women equally and fairly at work, and whether they would recommend their employer to other women.

• Actual Salaries by job and industry. Unlike some review sites, Fairygodboss does not ask for a specific number when it comes to compensation. However, we do ask job review providers to associate their review with a salary range so as to help provide contextual information about yourselt to someone reading your review. While this runs the risk of compromising anonymity, so does asking for a specific compensation data point since your salary or bonus may be relatively unique.
• Parental Leave Guide by Company. We try to help parents-to-be understand not only what maternity and paternity leave policies may be at an employer but whether it is really socially acceptable at a company for an employee to take their full allotment of leave, and whether doing so would jeopardize their career progression or stigmatize them as a less committed employee.
• Work-Life Balance Guide for those looking for a more flexible position. We believe that it’s important to understand the flexibility of a job or employer and comments about the ability to work remotely, flexible and/or part-time are very important aspects of whether a job or company is desirable.

We would never suggest that any one site captures all the information you need if you’re trying to conduct a thorough analysis of potential employers. To that end, if you’re interested in other sources of job reviews, we’ve compiled a list of 11 additional places you can go to see free and anonymous employee reviews:

Glassdoor is probably the best known website for employees to leave reviews of employers. They have a huge number of people who rate their CEOs, and Glassdoor reviews provide open-ended pros and cons of working at those companies.

Best known for aggregating millions of jobs across the internet by scraping websites that list open positions, Indeed also provide job reviews where users rank their employers with according to a 5-star scale and list pros and cons.

Vault came into prominence with it’s industry rankings, that were based on employee survey answers. Currently, Vault will provide access to premium research offerings in exchange for employee reviews and their reviews require employees to leave “uppers” and “downers” as well as comments about their current or former employers.

CareerBliss is a career community that contains employee reviews that include a 5-star rating system, as well as scores for things like company culture, colleagues and working setting, among other things. They also allow for open-ended commentary.

Kununu is a job review and listings site that allows employees to rate their employer on a 1-5 scale overall, as well as on many other factors such as job-security or leadership support. They are fully integrated with Monster, one of the first major online job boards.

JobAdvisor is an Australian job listings site that also features employee reviews. Users rate their company on a scale of 1-5 and list pros and cons, as well as rate things such as “Vision & Strategy” and “Work Environment.”

Ratemyemployer is a division of JobWings, a company based in Canada and focused on Canadian companies and employees. Employees may leave detailed 5-star ratings on a number of metrics ranging from “Stress” and “Business model, vision and strategy,” to “Feedback”.  

The JobCrowd is a UK based employee review site focused on recent graduates. Their employee reviews allow employees to rate the company on a 5-star scale and includes the job title of the reviewer as well as answers to the questions “What are the best and worst things about your company?” and “What do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?” 

Ivy Exec features company profile pages with candid and up-to-date reviews and ratings from employees on elements such as culture, prestige, work, leadership, and money as well as detailed breakdowns of the components for each topic. Their comprehensive review pages offer a holistic view of life at the company and employee satisfaction levels.

Comparably originally launched as a compensation data and culture platform and has recently launched employee reviews that allow employees to rate their employers on questions like “How would you rate your manager?” and “Do you look forward to interacting with your coworkers.”

Yelp is normally considered a restaurant or consumer business review site but employees are increasingly leaving reviews about their workplaces on the site. The reviews work in standard Yelp fashion and include a 5-star rating and comments. (To be clear, Yelp asks that employees of businesses do not leave reviews.)

The Context and Evolution of Employee Review Sites

Before the widespread availability of employee review sites, employee feedback was often relegated to the employee performance evaluation, employee self-evaluation forms, during the sporadic mid-year review or annual review. These days, however, employees also have the power to submit a performance appraisal… of the employer. Employee evaluations outside the control of the official channels can reveal useful information that may not otherwise come out during an annual employee review, even an anonymous one, for fear of being found out.

As the internet has increased the amount and dissemination paths of information overall, the workplace experiences that have previously been so cloaked and restricted to only the employees within a firm or a handful of recently departed works, have come to light. As a consequence, increasingly, the employee role is as a brand ambassador and representative of the company. Whether you perceive your role to be that or not, every employee now has the ability to make their voice heard and contribute to conversations around a company’s culture, policies and benefits.

As an employee review site ourselves, Fairygodboss gets even more specific. We have decided to focus specifically and exclusively on the female experience in the workplace because we say that when no questions are asked, the experiences employees would volunteer would veer towards overall observations at the expense of some very important personal perspectives. That’s why Fairygodboss has decided to steer clear of asking women the “pros” and “cons” of working somewhere. We have not done everything differently, just to be different for its own sake, however.

Example

Since all employee review sites seem to use them, we have caved in to the pressure to rate employers on a 5-star system (though admittedly, our design employes wings, instead of stars). In most cases, the questions we ask of the women in our community are based on what women we’ve spoken to say are the topics they want to hear about from other women, in particular. There are plenty of sites where you can get a general sense of a company’s culture. However, our questions about gender equality, what would cause women to stay at a company, and whether they would recommend the company to other women. These topics reflect the specificity we think women in the job-market really want to see.

How to Get the Most out of Employee Review Sites

Now that you’re armed with a list of resources, how do you proceed to make the most of this information without suffering from information overload? For starters, don’t forget that what’s true off-line is true online as well. Different people can have very different opinions of the same situation and even identical managers, much less, the entire company, so it’s best to try to understand whose opinions you’re really getting and whether you believe their perspective would be similar to yours. Read more than just one or two reviews to make sure that you’re getting a representative sense of what people say. While it may be tempting to simply read the most recent reviews, going back further in history will give you a sense of how a company has evolved.

• Pay attention to what you can learn about when an employee worked somewhere (e.g. a past employer may have biases against their former employer that a current employee does not have).
• Also, try to glean title, seniority, tenure and other aspects of the person whose job review are reading. Your goal is not to figure out the employee’s name but to understand whether their experience would be more or less comparable to yours given the specific job you’re looking for. This may mean you want to find out whether someone works in the particular office you are applying for a job in, or whether they work a comparable level of title to the one you would expect to receive. What you care about may be more identity driven. Is the reviewer another working mom, a minority, or someone who is otherwise under-represented in the workplace? Your identity does matter when it comes to whether you will experience the same conditions at work as those leaving job reviews.

Whatever job review site(s) you use, at the end of the day, the larger point is this: These days, there are many places you can discover what it’s like to work somewhere. Employers no longer have a monopoly on the information out there about work-life balance or information about employee engagement. Be sure to take advantage of the two-way conversation inherent in employee review sites when you’re doing your research with these 11 employee review sites.

What’s your no. 1 piece of advice for how to best use employer and company reviews? Share your answer in the comments to help other Fairygodboss members!

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