Anonymous employee reviews can surface real signal, but the same employers being rated pay Glassdoor for branding and recruiting, and critics question how reliably solicited or pressured reviews get filtered out.
What it's really for An employer-review platform; reviews are free, and employers pay for recruiting tools.
What our grade covers The grade on this page is about its anonymous employee ratings and 'Best Places to Work', not everything the site does.
High Scoring Confidence Checked against primary sources. We are confident in the facts and the grade here.
Employers pay the most: revenue comes from employer branding, recruiting subscriptions, and job advertising, and paid branding lets a company highlight a positive "Featured Review" and buy placement at the top of search and recommended feeds, though it does not let them delete or rewrite individual organic reviews.
Source →- Operating since
- 2007 (19 years) · source
- What it costs you
- Free to read The reviews are free to read.
- How they make money
- A two-sided platform where employees post anonymous company reviews and salaries for free, while employers pay for job ads, recruiting tools, and branded profiles.
- What they do
- Glassdoor aggregates anonymous, self-reported employee reviews, ratings, salary data, and interview accounts to produce company ratings and "Best Places to Work" rankings.
- What to watch for
- The rated employers are also Glassdoor's paying customers, and by Glassdoor's own disclosure it cannot fully confirm a reviewer's identity or employment status, so a high star rating is not an independently verified one.
- Composite score
- 2.30 / 5.00 → grade C
How the grade was reached
Does the site take money from the very entities it ranks? Pay-for-placement, vendor-funded data, and affiliate commissions all pull this down. The less the ranking can be bought, the higher the score.
What is the ranking actually built on? Hands-on testing scores highest, then verified first-hand reviews, then opinion or popularity surveys and self-reported figures, then pay-to-rank, which scores lowest.
Is the methodology published, specific, and reproducible? Can a reader see how a given rank was reached, or is it a black box?
Are commercial relationships, sponsorships, and affiliate arrangements disclosed clearly and near the rankings themselves, rather than buried?
How hard is it to game? Controls against fake reviews, solicited reviews, and vendor gaming raise this; an open box anyone can stuff lowers it.
Evidence
- Glassdoor was co-founded in 2007 by Tim Besse, Robert Hohman, and Expedia founder Rich Barton; in May 2018 Japanese firm Recruit Holdings agreed to acquire it for $1.2 billion in cash, completing the deal in June 2018, after which it became a Recruit Holdings subsidiary. Source: Wikipedia - Glassdoor →
- Glassdoor makes money by selling premium services to employers: job postings and CPC job advertising, plus 'employer branding' that optimizes how a company is presented, including the ability to highlight a positive review and push it to the top of the company's feed and target job seekers with branded campaigns. Source: ProductMint - Glassdoor Business Model →
- Glassdoor limits users to one review per company per year per review type, says it cannot fully confirm every user's identity or employment status, and posts an 'Inflated Reviews' alert when it has evidence an employer artificially boosted its rating in violation of its no-incentivization-or-coercion policy. Source: Glassdoor Help Center - Review Integrity & Fraud Detection →