THE GLOBE AND MAIL/SOURCE GETTY IMAGES/The Globe and Mail
Here’s a question for your next staff meeting or exec confab: what’s the company’s received wisdom about reviews posted on Glassdoor, the third-party workplace experience site? Nothing more than grievances from former employees, fake reviews planted by competitors, and suspiciously sunny posts from corporate climbers? Or are all those anonymous comments, aggregated metrics and top-line ratings an important source of feedback for managers, executives and recruiters?
“I do think these reviews have a really important place—especially for voices that aren’t always heard in the room, and those can be equity-deserving voices that feel there’s discrimination,” says Jane Griffith, founder of Griffith Group Executive Search.
Others are more ambivalent. “I don’t put a whole bunch of faith in Glassdoor,” says Marion Halmos, a Toronto recruiting strategist. “Typically, people choose to write on them because they are disgruntled or because they are trying to make a name for themselves. Having said that, when there’s a consistent set of negative reviews for an organization trying to do a recruitment campaign, then I would talk to them about their employer brand and their employee value proposition.”
New research from several academic teams suggests companies should be paying closer and more systematic attention to third-party review sites by evaluating how such data either reinforces, or contradicts, more conventional HR, management and recruiting techniques.
Employee experiences researcher Jenelle Morgan, a PhD candidate in industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Calgary, recounts a conversation she had with a large firm that did not have its head in the sand. “They used machine learning to go through all of those reviews,” she says. “I’m seeing some level of care about what people are saying about their organization. We’re seeing new roles being developed, like employee experience managers and employee engagement managers, who are keeping on top of these reviews.”
In fact, Morgan and Derek Chapman, a U of C associate professor of psychology, recently published a study in Computers in Human Behaviour Reports that evaluated almost 25,000 Glassdoor reviews to gauge their usefulness to both job seekers and firms. One of their key findings: that negative reviews from former employees tended to garner the highest helpfulness ratings. Such behaviour, they note, should prompt employers not only to pay more attention to what they’re hearing during exit interviews but also to reflect on the state of the firm’s brand among the broader job-seeking public.
When companies ignore middling Glassdoor ratings or are in denial about the veracity of negative comments that are out in the open for all to see, they effectively give those criticisms more credibility, Morgan and Chapman caution. “It is important that organizations develop an aptitude for evaluating their employees’ experiences...and examine what leads to workers’ need to publicize their narratives online,” their study concludes.
There’s a vast and embedded industry dedicated to taking the emotional temperature of workplaces, using surveys and other types of check-ins, as well as metrics such as turnover, the number of applicants for open positions and so on. Yet in the years since Glassdoor opened its digital, well, doors in 2008, that industry has collided with another unstoppable societal force: the online ratings industrial complex.
We all read them, from Yelp’s restaurant ratings to the holiday kvetching you can find on Tripadvisor. Every small business now routinely asks customers to post a five-star rating to Google on their way out the door. The proliferation of ratings has also created a new form of media literacy. Most people who shop on Amazon recognize that the customer review drop-down is a highly contested space filled with legitimate feedback, vendor PR and misdirection.
Glassdoor and its ilk (Rate My Professors, etc.) emerged to fill a desire from job seekers to see warts-and-all information on prospective employers. But these sites also serve as a reminder that internal employee surveys—which in theory should head off the sorts of gripes that show up on Glassdoor—aren’t always a reliable source of feedback about workplace problems due to lingering doubts about anonymity. “As somebody who has worked on employee survey projects, that is a valid concern,” says Morgan. “Will there be retaliation? Is this really confidential? To what extent is this mandatory? There’s almost a hesitance to share negative content or experiences with the organization.”
HR managers and recruiters who are determined to gain a thorough understanding of a firm’s culture should combine internally generated feedback with data from Glassdoor, focusing in particular on consistent types of comments or themes. “You might have a specific review that outlines some negative thing that happened with the organization,” says Morgan. “But to what extent is that a consistent thread among all these other reviews?”
Griffith agrees. “We all know you can manipulate data to get it to support any story, but what we’re looking for is multiple points of data and the consistencies or the variances,” she says. For example, a company’s internal survey results might indicate it has a fantastic culture, a cohesive senior leadership team that supports the CEO, and happy employees. “If we compare that to something like Glassdoor, and it’s significantly different, then we know that there’s a problem there,” she says.
The tenor of employer responses to Glassdoor reviews also matters. A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management looked at 19,000 reviews by staff in 115 hotels, as well as 4,400 employer responses, posted to Glassdoor. The researchers, based in Macau and Las Vegas, found that when hotel managers answered negative reviews with forthright, explanatory responses, they could mitigate the negative effects on hiring. The study also recommends that managers tasked with posting to Glassdoor be given guidelines on how to craft “customized explanations.”
Yet another analysis of Glassdoor reviews suggests that boards of directors, and their compensation consultants, may be scrutinizing these third-party evaluations more intently than C-suite executives realize. A 2024 paper published in Organization Science looked at publicly disclosed hiring and compensation data from about 1,200 firms and 1,760 CEOs. The four-person research team concluded that companies with better reviews on Glassdoor tended to reward their CEOs with higher compensation packages, while those whose reviews flagged fired their top executives more frequently. “These findings,” they noted, “suggest that boards’ evaluations of CEO compensation and retention incorporate employee satisfaction ratings.”
Co-author John Li, an assistant professor of accounting at Toronto Metropolitan University, says there’s a growing body of evidence in proxy statements that boards are using both internal employee satisfaction metrics and external ones like Glassdoor to make decisions about CEOs—and for a variety of reasons. Some boards simply place a premium on a company’s human capital and the ability to recruit talented people, while others are more concerned with potential bad publicity or satisfying a corporate social responsibility imperative. “If CSR is a core component of the company’s brand, then you might expect that employee satisfaction matters more for your board,” says Li.
Whatever the motive, these repositories of anonymous comments force companies to pay attention and not just lip service. Some firms are even setting up “war rooms” to look at all sorts of data, notes Griffith. “Glassdoor, but also [proxy voting site] Glass Lewis if they’re a publicly traded company on a stock exchange, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Bluesky—wherever there are comments,” she says.
Halmos, for her part, leverages Glassdoor’s influence when she’s hiring for a corporate client. Once it gets down to the final candidates, she’ll ask if they’ve looked at the Glassdoor reviews and what they think about them. That helps her in two ways, she says: “One, it tells me how much research the candidate has done about the organization, and two, it potentially prevents a problem at the offer stage.”
In an economy with relatively low unemployment and skills shortages, job seekers not only have the upper hand but also these additional windows into the culture of firms trying to fill jobs. Sure, there may be some distortions in those public-facing sites. Still, Morgan adds, “There’s something true about the organization across these reviews, especially if you’re paying attention to the common threads. I mean, you can’t lie to the applicant.”
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