By Gary Slack
Glassdoor really is coming into its own as a terrific tool for job-seekers of all types—college students looking for internships or full-time jobs and anyone and everyone looking to change jobs or careers.
The platform used to be mainly for checking out what current and former employees anonymously say about their employers, but the site now does double duty big time as a repository of jobs—getting as much monthly job-post traffic as LinkedIn does.
Some interesting things about Glassdoor:
- The average company rating on Glassdoor (on a 1-5 scale) is 3.2. In my experience, any company that’s at 3.6 or above is doing pretty well.
- Caveat emptor with companies 2.6 or below—and, yes, there are plenty that do that poorly. They probably should be quarantined.
- But don’t pay too much attention to a company’s rating if it only has a handful of reviews—say 10 or fewer.
- Companies that have thousands of even tens of thousands of reviews and are at 3.6 or above are doing a pretty good job by their employees. When they’re above 4.0, like Google is, that’s just amazing.
- Glassdoor tells us their research shows prospective employees going to the site put more stock in reviews and ratings of current vs. former employees. Makes sense.
- Look at how raters rate the company’s CEO. And whether they would recommend the company to a friend and whether their overall feeling about the company’s future is negative, neutral or positive.
- You also can learn a lot about prospective employers from their company pages on Glassdoor—usually much more robust than company pages on LinkedIn.
You still need a strong LinkedIn profile more than ever, but consider making Glassdoor your first stop on the way to a first job or a better career.
Gary Slack is the chief experience office of Slack and Company, one of the world leading business-to-business marketing agencies. His firm uses Glassdoor to the hilt to source great talent, but does not, and never has, worked for Glassdoor.