Glassdoor is an American website where current and former employees anonymously review companies. Headquartered in
San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
, it has additional offices in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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,
Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...
,
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, and
São Paulo
São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the GaWC a ...
. Glassdoor also allows its users to anonymously submit and view salaries as well as search and apply for jobs on its platform.
In 2018, the company was acquired by the multinational firm
Recruit Holdings
is a human resources Company (law), company headquartered in Japan. It was founded as "Daigaku Shimbun Koukokusha" in 1960 as an advertisement company that specialized in university newspapers. It owns the job search engine Indeed and the empl ...
for US$1.2 billion, and it continues to operate as an independent subsidiary.
Founding
The company was cofounded in 2007 by
Tim Besse
Tim Besse (born 1980) is an American entrepreneur and business executive. Besse is most notable for co-founding Glassdoor in 2007 and for currently serving as the firm's Chief Anything Officer.
Besse earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Account ...
,
Robert Hohman
Robert Hohman (born 1970/71) is the co-founder and chairman of Glassdoor, the jobs and recruiting site, which was acquired by Recruit Holdings in 2018. Hohman served as CEO of Glassdoor from 2007 to 2020.
Early life and education
Hohman grew up ...
, who serves as the company's CEO, and
Expedia
Expedia Inc. is an online travel agency owned by Expedia Group, an American online travel shopping company based in Seattle. The website and mobile app can be used to book airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruise ships, and vacat ...
founder
Rich Barton
Richard Barton (born June 2, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Zillow Group. Barton founded online travel company (and Microsoft spinoff) Expedia, Inc., real-estate internet company Zillow, and job s ...
, who served as the company's chairman.
[ As revealed in an 2014 article in the '']New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'', the idea came from a brainstorming
Brainstorming is a group creativity technique by which efforts are made to find a conclusion for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its members.
In other words, brainstorming is a situation where a grou ...
session between Barton and Hohman, when Barton relayed the story of accidentally leaving the results of an employee survey on the printer while working at Expedia, when the two began to think about what would have happened if the results had gotten out into the public. The two hypothesized that if the material had been revealed publicly, it could have been a service to those looking to make career decisions. The company's headquarters were established in Mill Valley, California
Mill Valley is a city in Marin County, California, Marin County, California, United States, located about north of San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge and from Napa Valley. The population was 14,231 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 ...
.
Website
Glassdoor launched its company ratings site in June 2008, as a site that "collects company reviews and real salaries from employees of large companies and displays them anonymously for all members to see", according to TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately ...
. The company then averaged the reported salaries, posting these averages alongside the reviews employees made of the management and culture of the companies they worked for – including some of the larger tech companies like Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
and Yahoo
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...
. The site also allows the posting of office photographs and other company-relevant media.[
The site later also began focusing on CEOs and workplaces and what it is like to work at jobs in general. Employee reviews are averaged for each company. Glassdoor ratings are based on user-generated reviews. Each year Glassdoor ranks overall company ratings to determine its annual Employees’ Choice Awards, also known as the Best Places to Work Awards. The website verifies that each review of a company comes from real employees "through technological checks of e-mail addresses and through screenings by a content management team", according to Glassdoor spokesman Scott Dobroski.][Vanessa Wong, '']BusinessWeek
''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...
'', March 18, 2013
Why Employees Like Zuckerberg (and Other Popular CEOs)
/ref> The company has stated that it rejects about 20% of entries after screening. Rules for posting reviews are different for smaller companies than they are for larger companies in order to preserve the anonymity of people in close departments.
In 2010, Glassdoor released a fee-based program called "Enhanced Employer Profiles", which allows employers to include their own content on Glassdoor profiles, like executive biographies, classifieds, social media links, and referrals. The company also allows users to post potential job interview questions that might be asked by certain companies, acquired by interviewed job candidates, in addition to other information that can be used to prepare job applications. The reputation a company has on Glassdoor has also been found correlative by Case Western Professor Casey Newmeyer. It has also been used to vet potential client companies.
In 2014, the company hired Adam Spiegel as its CFO, with the intention of preparing for an eventual IPO
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
. By 2015, the site had 30 million users from 190 countries and corporate clients including one third of all Fortune 500
The ''Fortune'' 500 is an annual list compiled and published by ''Fortune'' magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years. The list includes publicly held companies, along ...
companies. That year, Glassdoor also began creating localized websites and mobile apps for different national jurisdictions, such as Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
.
In September 2016, Glassdoor acquired Brazil's Love Mondays to expand into Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived f ...
.
The company's own site stats updated Q1 2017 show 41 million unique users and 5,800 paying employer clients or partners. The statistics showed that the average company rating is 3.3, on a 5-point scale where 1.0 is very dissatisfied; 72% of employees rate their job/company "OK" and average CEO approval rating is 67%.
In 2017, Glassdoor announced on its website that it would no longer post job advertisement
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
s that exclude people with criminal records.
In November 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals required disclosing Glassdoor's anonymous users' identities to prosecutors investigating possible criminal misconduct by their employers. Investigators sought to speak with reviewers who might have seen crimes committed. The court's decision did not require sharing reviewers' identities with employers.
In February 2019, Glassdoor announced that COO Christian Sutherland-Wong would be promoted to President & COO.
In May 2020, Glassdoor announced it was laying off 300 people. The cut accounted for 30% of the company's workforce and half of the Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
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, subdivision_type = Country
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office. In an internal memo, CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong cited an overall decrease in hiring and recruiting across multiple industries due to the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
.
Reports
Glassdoor produces reports based upon the data collected from its users, on topics including work–life balance
Work may refer to:
* Work (human activity), intentional activity people perform to support themselves, others, or the community
** Manual labour, physical work done by humans
** House work, housework, or homemaking
** Working animal, an animal tr ...
, CEO pay-ratios, lists of the best office places and cultures, and the accuracy of corporate job searching
Job hunting, job seeking, or job searching is the act of looking for employment, due to unemployment, underemployment, discontent with a current position, or a desire for a better position. The immediate goal of job seeking is usually to obtain ...
maxims. Data from Glassdoor has also been used by outside sources to produce estimates on the effects of salary trends and changes on corporate revenues. Glassdoor also puts the conclusions of its research of other companies towards its own company policies.[ In 2015, Tom Lakin produced the first study of Glassdoor in the ]United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
, concluding that Glassdoor is regarded by users as a more trustworthy source of information than career guides or official company documents.
Financing
The company received its first financing in 2008, receiving $3 million in funding, before launching its website. In 2012 Glassdoor received $20 million of venture capital
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...
, taking its total outside funding to $42.2 million.[Sarah Perez, '']TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately ...
'', October 31, 2012
Glassdoor Raises $20M Series D To Expand Internationally
!--versions of article found at Internet Archive from 2012, 2013 and 2014--> The following year, the company raised an additional $50 million. In 2015 the company raised an additional $70 million, in an investment round led by Google Capital
CapitalG (formerly Google Capital) is the independent growth fund under Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a r ...
, giving the company a valuation of just short of $1 billion. The total of investment at this point was $160 million. In 2016 Glassdoor raised an additional $40 million from investors. In May 2018, Recruit Holdings
is a human resources Company (law), company headquartered in Japan. It was founded as "Daigaku Shimbun Koukokusha" in 1960 as an advertisement company that specialized in university newspapers. It owns the job search engine Indeed and the empl ...
announced its intention to acquire Glassdoor for $1.2 billion in cash, with the acquisition completed in June 2018.
Awards
In April 2013, Glassdoor won a Red Herring
A red herring is a figurative expression referring to a logical fallacy in which a clue or piece of information is or is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual question.
Red herring may also refer to: Animals
* Red herring (fis ...
North America Award for Social Media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
Innovation.
Controversy
As of December 2022 Glassdoor has a 1.2/5 "Bad" rating on Trustpilot, the integrity of Glassdoor's business concept being questioned by many of the reviewers. In June 2022 Glassdoor lost a defamation lawsuit, forcing it to unmask the identity of users of the Glassdoor website who anonymously left negative reviews about their former employer.
References
External links
* {{official, https://www.glassdoor.com/
Recruit (company)
Business services companies established in 2007
Employment websites in the United States
Companies based in Marin County, California
Mill Valley, California
Internet properties established in 2008
2008 establishments in California
American review websites
2018 mergers and acquisitions
American subsidiaries of foreign companies
Professional networks