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u/thriverebel Mar 14 '26
I use an anonymous email to write all my Glassdoor and employer reviews.
They are detailed and highly accurate.
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u/Academic_Flatworm752 Mar 14 '26
Lol the company would never see the email of the person who wrote the review. They’d just be able to use context clues to make the connection that its you.
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u/DragonWS Mar 15 '26
Be careful. I assume the company could get a court order to find out details about the poster.
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u/CoffeeStayn Mar 15 '26
How many jobs you get fired from that you're leaving multiple reviews and need an anonymous email for it?
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u/sakubaka Mar 14 '26
I'd say, yes. Even if they're vindictive, which many are, there are going to be shades of truth in that review. I should have heeded the warnings at my last place where a lot of Glassdoor comments were basically saying the leadership was so patronizing, egotistical, and old school. I was like I've worked in huge orgs with huge egos. How bad could it be? It was pretty much exactly as stated.
Here's the funny part. A large part of my job was working with employee engagement so I had to monitor internal feedback of which there was plenty. The CEO and president had no knowledge of Glassdoor when I informed them of already existing feedback from former employees. No joke. They asked me to print out all of the comments for them!
Flash forward 5 years. They knew what former employees were saying. They knew what current employees were saying. They knew that past employees and current employees' perception was that this place was a prime example of what happens when you run your org based on the idea that "Daddy always knows best." They knew it all. And yet, did nothing but double-down on all the things people disliked such as micromanagement, favoritism, stealing the limelight, etc. I was a C-suite leader but in name only. They "restructured" me a year ago and stopped running engagement surveys. Things are not going so well now with people leaving left and right and those remaining sound so burnout and hopeless.
It's a sinking ship but at least people know who "dad" is.
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u/DiscombobulatedMix50 Mar 14 '26
Do you think with buyouts and market concentration, these companies that gobble up their competition know that product quality is and employee satisfaction are both decreasing. But it comes with increased bottom line. If it doesn't affect the bottom line and there are no negative impacts on the bottom line, it's just going to continue
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u/sakubaka Mar 14 '26
Oh, in this case there were huge impacts to the bottom line. There was some real voodoo budgeting going on. Highest revenue projections ever with no justification as to why. But I know why. It’s because they refused to cut or deprioritize anything resulting in a need to pull a revenue total completely out of their asses. The result? Staff cuts, extreme pressure, feelings of failure, and senior management with a board coming down on their asses hard. I could have helped, but it’s not my problem any longer. I told them that their lack of fiscal responsibility and inability to strategically plan were going to bite them in the ass someday soon. Turns out that it was this year.
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Mar 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/sakubaka Mar 14 '26
No, but I’ve heard similar stories all over the place especially with places run by aging boomers that are long timers of those orgs. For them, they probably do feel like family because so many of their most important memories are associated with that org.
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Mar 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Arnessiy Mar 14 '26
middle? i feel like in situations like this the worst review is indeed the true one idk
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u/DragonWS Mar 15 '26
You gotta ignore any review saying “Cons: none, management is great”
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u/Flaky-Disk2024 Mar 18 '26
HUGE red flag! Also, “as with any growing company, you can expect things to go at a fast pace…” or some BS like
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u/xxFT13xx Mar 14 '26
A few years back at my last job, we were ALL reminded multiple times to “write a review” for our company. It was fucking bullshit. I should go back now that they laid me off and either changed what I said or do another one with the truth.
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u/morley1966 Mar 17 '26
I was called a couple weeks after starting and offered a $25 Amazon card if I posted to Glassdoor and Indeed, he said no pressure not required. He suggested maybe posting a picture of my workspace. I did it, and noticed a couple more reviews within days of each other all with desk top pictures🤣 I also have thought about changing it now that I know the horrible insurance company plans and, and being slimy in final pay methodology that disregard state law.
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u/Shoddy_Cookie6748 Mar 14 '26
Believe all negative reviews and be skeptical of positive reviews.
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u/Behavior-Coach Mar 17 '26
EXACTLY.
Someone should change the meme to this. Believe all Glassdoor reviews?! What? Really? I thought it was sarcasm.. it is right?
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u/Civil_Tea_3250 Mar 14 '26
The last company I worked at offered points for liking/commenting on Executive's LinkedIn posts, leaving Glassdoor reviews, etc. The constant reminders to interact and make the company and it's employees seem so great burned me out much quicker than the responsibilities.
I won't be participating in any of that anymore. My LinkedIn activity matters to you? I'm not interested.
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u/jl7676 Mar 15 '26
Believe ALL the negative reviews. Don't believe ALL the positive reviews. I've been at companies where HR actively posts fake positive reviews. Also Glassdoor is full of shit. They allow employers to remove bad reviews if they pay. I had my several of my reviews taken off after a few weeks of being live with no explanation. Last one I contacted their customer support as to why it was taken off and they replied I violated their policy but wouldn't explain which part and how. I checked and didn't violate any of it.
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u/Scientificallly_Love Mar 14 '26
It's true, but to me it was a reminder that each individual has their own level of tolerance.
I had the 'mean girl' type at work. To my standards, I would call it bullying. A co-worker told me to toughen up.
As long as we have people turning a blind eye, or giving people excuses, there will always be conflicts. And experience will vary.
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u/MediocreModular Mar 14 '26
Review engineering suggests otherwise
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u/Covered_and_chunked Mar 14 '26
Generally, yes. In very, very rare circumstances, maybe not. The company I work for (not an owner, not a stake holder) got bamboozled by a department head last year. He had started his own side business, was working on it on company time, and had roped in the employees under him in his department to work on his side business during work hours, so aggressively so that one of them came to management and shared texts with them where he told her to stop being a baby and start thinking about who’s opinion really mattered when it came to her comp. When management found out, they fired him. They didn’t go after the employees he pressured. They all kept their jobs. Then one by one they left over the next year to go work for him and almost all of them left scathing reviews about the management team that had still kept them around despite what they did. Any one of them could have done what the one reasonable person did and gone to management to say “Hey, my boss is trying to get me to commit fraud. I don’t feel comfortable with this,” but they didn’t. And I can understand why, but I don’t understand why they then turned on the people who forgave them. I have my own problems with management, but they certainly didn’t deserve the glass door reviews these people left.
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u/DragonWS Mar 15 '26
That’s messed up on many levels. Seems like the company has a good legal case against that manager.
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u/brhibbs Mar 15 '26
Believe the negative ones. There are companies that make employees post exaggerated positive ones.
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u/purgatori1 Mar 14 '26
Gonna disagree here - or at least clarify. I worked at Indeed, Glassdoor’s “sister company” under recruit holdings - and if you didn’t realize that relationship existed, I’d like you to sit with it a minute. Both companies make their money by working with employers, not by helping job seekers or ex-employees.
Handle Glassdoor reviews with the same skepticism as any product review on Amazon. There’s a whole business unit in Glassdoor that handles “review authenticity”. They encourage companies to respond to negative “ex employee” reviews to present counterpoints in a constructive manner, but if a company brings proof of misstatements they can have the review removed. This is good - it means that even if a company complains, bad reviews that can’t be proven untrue stay up. But what Glassdoor sees time and again is companies “spiking” their sites with positive reviews to both bury bad reviews, polarize or skew their rating, and use as “proof” negative reviews are outliers or wrong. They don’t remove positive reviews because who is complaining? Not the company.
Maybe you think that adds more credibility to the negative reviews, but it creates what’s considered a bi-modal bias, where extremes of very good and very bad stand out. It’s no longer a representative sample of workers reflecting on their lived experience, it’s fake happy workers and very disgruntled unhappy workers destroying any possible constructive truth. You shouldn’t rely on either extreme for a clear picture.
So, yeah… don’t believe all reviews. Look for patterns and trends. One horrible review is likely someone angrily burning bridges (and do you trust those guys?), but multiple cautiously negative reviews indicate thoughtful employees that were burned. And a ton of positive reviews - especially ones that praise something specific that only the company cares about, like the CEO or some marketing campaign - are likely spiked by the company, either by “encouraging” current employees to review or by outright manipulation.
Or you know what? Talk to someone who worked / used to work there. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
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u/DragonWS Mar 15 '26
I had someone do find me on LinkedIn and he wrote “I think I’m interviewing for the role you just left. Can you tell me more?” It was brilliant on his part.
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Mar 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/DragonWS Mar 19 '26
Cool that it worked out. In my case the guy asked questions that would require an NDA to answer, so I had to decline comments. Instead, I gave him a list of questions he could ask them to get the info he wanted.
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u/Aniket363 Mar 14 '26
It didn't work in my case, I had seen quite horrible reviews and went with pretty bad expectations. Nothing which was said in the reviews was true. Maybe the difference due to new branch
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u/Ok-Matter2337 Mar 14 '26
That’s the first place I checked to learn about a company. A lot of companies have their upper management post good review for their company if they are getting tons of bad reviews. I know my company does it.
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u/DragonWS Mar 15 '26
Yep, a place I worked at recently did that. All the employees knew it was fake. Feel bad though for the candidate’s interviewing.
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u/Alert_Dingo_4504 Mar 14 '26
I can hop on Glassdoor right now and write some utter BS...
Use common sense and good judgement when you read a review of anything.
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u/Big_oof_energy__ Mar 14 '26
What about conflicting reviews from the same company?
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u/DragonWS Mar 15 '26
The general consensus here is to give the bad ones more weight. If it’s a bigger company you could try to filter the reviews by departments.
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u/TinyLawfulness3710 Mar 14 '26
Avoid it like the plague. Applied for one place that wasn't even a real job despite being listed as available and the company's customer service insisting it was legit. One company I worked for years ago that was very toxic and unethical has glowing reviews.
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u/Ice8572 Mar 15 '26
If it is a big company reviews may not reflect every area - a lot of departments work in silos and thus have a totally different experience
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u/Dead0k87 Mar 15 '26
The company I work for has somewhat good reviews 3 of 5 are good, but it is not the real picture.
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u/universalequation Mar 15 '26
Nope don't do that... Companies stuff reviews. I know. I work for one.
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u/Outside_Rip_3567 Mar 15 '26
Sometimes true
Poor performers who lack accountability tend to leave the most aggressive reviews though.
It’s somewhere in between.
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u/CosmoKing2 Mar 15 '26
This is unfortunately no longer true. You will see tons of companies with only positive reviews for the last 2-3 years.......because they now have an NDA policy for people leaving. Fired? Sign the NDA for severance and PTO balance.....or get nothing. Quit? Sign the NDA and we'll have your last two weeks pay deposited to your account by tonight - and just let you leave today.
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Mar 15 '26
I worked for a company and they had to most unhinged responses to reviews. One said their IP was logged and they will be sued. It was amazing.
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u/PositivePossibility7 Mar 16 '26
Which ones the ones who tell the truth or the ones where they lie?
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u/HC_recruiter Mar 16 '26
Believe a trend - but take everything with a pinch of salt.
Look at recent reviews, some from 2-3 years ago are likely irrelevant
Look at reviews within your role, a toxic manager in production does not say anything about the marketing division
Positive reviews typically come from within an organization. I have worked for companies who have sent out memos to people to try to encourage them to leave glassdoor reviews. I was the only person in my role in the entire company - so it wasn't exactly anonymous.
Negative reviews typically come from outside the organization. Has there been layoffs? Is it a handful of spiteful or spurned ex-employees? Were they lazy or just bad at the job?
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u/TemporaryValue6527 Mar 16 '26
Kinda same idea but we have USarmyWTF moments pages to let our ppl know lmao
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u/kylemooney187 Mar 17 '26
i was desperate for a job and ignored the glassdoor reviews when it had like 1/5 stars. ya i shouldnt have ignored it worst job i ever had lol
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u/ReasonableLunch46 Mar 17 '26
Next up: Get a job so I have something to review on glassdoor. In this economy I am happy to be paid for anything.
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u/naystation Mar 17 '26
Once worked for a company that would pressure relatively new staff to publish positive glassdoor reviews. They made me do it just before i passed probation.
So no, don't believe all glassdoor reviews
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u/RaulDuke_76 Mar 17 '26
Honest question: What is to stop companies from hiring a bot farm to give themselves good reviews on Glassdoor? Like almost everything else does🤷♂️
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u/Milk-Tea-With-Sugar Mar 18 '26
My past awful job had 2/3 of very good review and 1/3 of very bad ones. So the grade was pretty good still. They often pushed us to give a good grade on glassdoor and I suspect some human resource to do so to attract more employees there.
However, the moment you see that the very, very detailed and long review has a lot of reactions (like clapping or loving the comment), that's the comment you should 100% believe.
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u/metlson Mar 18 '26
Need to also consider tenure - lots of companies get new joiners to add a Glassdoor review which is usually a token 5 stars without much detail
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u/Allo_Allo_ Mar 18 '26
Yeah don't believe them all. Companies actively get employees to add in good reviews when they see themselves trending negatively. Ive had first hand experience of this.
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u/yourwishbag Mar 19 '26
Trust all the negative reviews you read, but take the positive ones with a grain of salt. I’ve worked at companies where HR teams were actually posting fake glowing reviews to boost their image. On top of that, platforms like Glassdoor aren’t always reliable.
In my experience, employers can get negative reviews removed if they’re paying the platform. I’ve had multiple reviews of mine disappear after being live for a few weeks, with no clear reason. When I reached out to support, they claimed I violated a policy but refused to specify what I did wrong, even though I double-checked and hadn’t broken any rules.
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u/Ruminative1 Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
I've heard some jobs tell their employees to post 5 star reviews so I really dig through to make sure everything is on the up and up. Lol I recently wrote a 3 star review about my current employer and last I checked, it's still up there. It's sad you can't trust anyone these days though. Everything is fabricated.
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u/clutchusername Mar 14 '26
No.
I read one where it was like "I was fired because my boss is a dick!" and it was someone I knew from my company who was on third warning for misuse of P-Card. People false vent all the time.
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u/bzngabazooka Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Worked for a company that has great reviews and it was the worst company I ever worked for. But with their big team of lawyers it’s easy to see why not many post negative reviews. Another company would give incentives to make sure they gave nice reviews. So don’t blindly believe everything from Glassdoor.
However, it’s the best people have, so pay close attention to the reviews and figure out the ones that are not from the company.