Peeking at Corporate Culture Through the Glassdoor
by Heather Cassell
What if you could provide your employer with a constructive review? How about knowing what your male co-workers are earning in the same position that you hold? What if you could tap into market trends in your career?
This important career information is available—if you are willing to take the time and energy to dig for it or pay your assistant to keep you abreast of industry vicissitudes. Or you can simply open Glassdoor.com, a new free consumer-based tool launched last month for executives and employees to post, review, rate, and monitor corporate culture, top company officials anonymously, and the golden egg—salaries—all sorted from industry to career field in a user-friendly format.
“Work matters a great deal to our daily lives,” says Robert Hohman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Glassdoor.com in a June 11 news release. “Yet, detailed information about jobs and employers is still hard to find. Glassdoor lets employers and recruiters instantly see how a company’s compensation and ratings stack up against the competition.”
Opening up corporate human resources files is the brainchild of Hohman, Tim Besse, and Richard Barton, which started with a simple question, “What would happen if someone left the unedited employee survey for the whole company on the printer and it got posted on the Web?” which Barton posed to Hohman last summer. The former Microsoft employees and Expedia executives began to brainstorm and research the idea.
They conducted an online survey of 2,464 individuals who have held any type of job and 1,691 currently employed individuals in May with Harris Interactive. They also brought Besse on board, another former Expedia executive, who developed the concept into an “approval ratings” system similar to “politician approval ratings” in order to bring transparency into the workplace, according to the Web site.
Barton, Glassdoor.com’s chairman of the board of directors, hasn’t quit his day job as chairman and CEO of Zillow.com or his other high tech power seats. He also sits on Netflix.com’s board and happens to be a venture partner at Benchmark Capital, a high tech venture capital firm, which is the $3 million behind Glassdoor.com, according to the release. Hohman wouldn’t comment about future financing.
Other high tech innovators from Electronic Arts and Trip Advisor, along with several global human resource experts, joined Glassdoor.com’s board in May. The company hopes to attract senior management, human resources and other senior level professionals to join its Employer Advisor Panel.
Some companies and employment recruiters have been taken by surprise. Representatives of Sun Microsystems and United Parcel Services, who have reviews on the site, told The Glass Hammer that they weren’t aware of the new site—but they were going to check it out, just in time to comment to The Glass Hammer prior to posting this article. Some human resources recruiters were much quicker to review and comment about Glassdoor.com.
“This tool could be a great resource for us,” says Bridgette Loyd Corridan, vice president of business development of Premier Staffing, Inc., a San Francisco-based boutique staffing firm, who sees it as an opportunity to more accurately measure the companies with which she would like to partner. Corridan says she already uses Salary.com, a similar site, but not for employer reviews.
Glassdoor.com is already proving to be a hit. 50,000 reviews and salary reports for more than 11,000 companies were posted within two weeks after the site launched on June 11th, according to Hohman. While Glassdoor.com has initially concentrated on Silicon Valley’s high-tech industries and New York’s financial services arenas, there are plans to expand from this base. An estimated 31 percent of content about Fortune 500 companies was available when it went public on the Web, according to Hohman, and visitors will be able to access another one-third of Fortune 500 companies soon. Nearly all of the Dow Jones Industrial industries are accessible on Glassdoor.com, he added.
Currently, visitors to the site can view information about high tech giants Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! without becoming members.
“We continue to receive positive feedback as well as a wealth of ideas from our community members for what other tools and resources they would like to see,” writes Hohman in a June 25th e-mail.
While there are other sites, such as Employerscorecard.com, Jobvent.com, Rateyouremployeramerica.com, Salary.com, and Vault.com, that offer similar services, Glassdoor.com combines the best of these sites diminishing much of the guessing game and leg work, empowering career moves on a whole new level.
Glassdoor.com provides an opportunity for career leverage, but how can women utilize this new tool to climb the rungs of the corporate ladder? Will women be able to use Glassdoor.com to break through the “glass ceiling” and eventually shatter it along with the wage gap? This remains to be seen, but Hohman is confident.
“Glassdoor provides an opportunity for anyone to become a more informed employee or employer through practical actionable insight into a job, career or industry,” writes Hohman, stating that they are “creating an opportunity” no matter what a person’s background is.
“Regardless of gender,” writes Hohman, “Glassdoor empowers the employee with tools and resources not previously available.”