EMPLOYER REVIEW AND jobs platform Glassdoor has launched a dedicated site catering to Irish workers ahead of opening a new European headquarters in Dublin.
The US-based company, which began life in 2008, already has 26,000 employer reviews, interview descriptions and salary reports relating to Irish roles, but now it will add tweaks to provide more-relevant information as well as local iOS and Android apps.
Glassdoor runs on a ‘give to get’ model, which gives users full access to employer information once they’ve posted a review or report about a company on the site.
Ireland will get the ninth territory-specific site from the company, which makes the bulk of its money from the 3,000-odd employers that pay for sponsored pages.
The head of Glassdoor’s international operations, Diarmuid Russell, told TheJournal.ie the site rewarded companies that encouraged transparency, like those which invited their workers to leave anonymous feedback on the platform.
Even for companies such as Amazon, which has earned a reputation as a ‘bruising workplace’, the reviews give potential employees an insight into what they are getting themselves in for.
“My impression of that company is that they’ve built a very specific and unique workplace culture that is going to work really, really, really well for some people and really badly for others,” Russell said.
So (with Glassdoor) the people who want to work in that kind of environment will be drawn there and the people who don’t will stay away, and that’s probably good for Amazon and for people looking for a job.”
Where the truth lies
Similar to other crowd-sourced review sites, like TripAdvisor, the main criticism levelled at Glassdoor has surrounded fake feedback.
With only an email address required to contribute to the site, the company’s filters and human moderators are all that stand in the way of spam from companies that try to lift their own ratings with fawning reports or trash their competitors.
But beyond the undisclosed methods used to weed out the “less than genuine reviews”, Russell said it was the way employees and job hunters engaged with the site that provided the best foil to any iffy content.
“What our users tell us is that typically they will read four to seven reviews before they form an opinion,” he said.
If you look at stuff across the spectrum, it’s fairly easy to actually sort out where the truth lies and typically speaking, both on the positive and the negative side, if people excessively rant or if people are overly gushing and full of praise, people tend to apply a pretty steep discount factor to that.”
Glassdoor will open its Dublin office in January and the company expects to have at least 30 staff based in Ireland by the end of 2016. The local headcount is due to reach 100 within three years.
It will be recruiting sales, marketing and some product-development staff to handle its operations in Europe, where it has already rolled out local sites for the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
“Really, what’s attractive about Dublin is that it is slightly cheaper (than London), but also the access to talent that you’ve got here because it has become this tech cluster where you have so many international companies coming,” Russell said.
Sure the real estate market is a little bit crazy looking for office space, but the people that we want to hire are all here living in Dublin, whether they’re Irish citizens, or French, or German, or Dutch.”
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