Glassdoor - gives new meaning to corporate transparency?
June 12th, 2008 by Jim AmosA new company fresh out of the gate with $3M venture capital just launched glassdoor: a site where employees can anonymously rate their company CEO and share their salary data as well as general reviews of the company they work for. Neato.
This is not an entirely new idea, of course – sites like ‘the vault’ and payscale already offer more or less the same experience - the difference is in cost of membership and ease of use. On glassdoor there is no premium membership required in order to view and review the data, you can sign up without much effort and begin looking at all the gory details within just a few minutes. It also looks and feels more like a social network than it’s more ‘professional style’ competitors.
This is a logical continuation of the same mentality pervading every market right now: more power to the individual user, customer, voter, employee etc through web 2.0 and social media. Allowing employees to vote on their CEO is really not so different from opening up a product for star ratings and reviews, and even though I’m sure it will leave a few corporate leaders with elevated blood pressure, the good one’s can surely only benefit from having a good public opinion, or at least knowing why your employees despise you (if that happens to be the case).
The one perhaps controversial element of the site is the sharing of company salary information. Not only can this kind of thing probably get you fired in some corps, but It’ll be interesting to see if HR departments around the US embrace the idea of such information gathering or if they’ll dismiss it as lies, all lies!
And in case you’re interested: looks like our own company already has an entry set up awaiting submission.
What do the people think? Is this a good use of social media as an empowering tool, or does it scare you? Or is it ultimately something that will make little if any impact on how HR depts figure salaries – thus not really helping employees at all? For more information on the company and other comments take a look at this techcrunch article.
Tags: hr departments, public opinion, salary data, salary information, Social Media
June 12th, 2008 at 8:20 am
This seems like one of those “gut check” types of social media where execs can read about how people really feel about their company. It’s one of the aspects of social media that many might not like, which is hearing about the negatives (including salary). But you have to take the good with the bad.
On the flip side, how are you supposed to improve the quality of life for your employees if you don’t know the downsides of the company. So, if it takes off, this could be a really useful site, depending on how you view it.