Oneupweb Reviews | Glassdoor
A free inside look behind the iron curtains of hundreds of thousands of businesses, including juggernauts like Google and Facebook and digital marketing powerhouses like Oneupweb? How convenient! But, I see the word “free,” so there’s a catch, right? Oh—users must first provide Glassdoor with content about a current or former employer (a review, salary, interview questions, etc.). Minor inconvenience. And fear not: Glassdoor promises anonymity, so users are sure to give only one, heartfelt, balanced and completely true review of an employer. Only a small minority, statistically insignificant, would use the site as a forum to spread dissent about a company’s business practices.
Besides, Glassdoor requires fair and balanced content. Users must list positives AND negatives, which leads to especially helpful reviews like “well, the office had pretty pictures” followed by a tirade against management and operations. The review could be entirely true. It can just as easily be complete fabrication. And any number of people can see the information.
The vast, potential audience for these reviews is especially problematic for companies that live and breathe on the Web. After all, as stated in Reno v ACLU, “through [the Internet] any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox” and “the content on the Internet is as diverse as human thought.”
Human thought is, indeed, diverse and it can be moving, emotional and beautiful. It can also be vile, hateful and insidious. And in the Digital Age, even the most illiterate, disgruntled malcontent can stand upon his viral soapbox and spew venomous epithets traditionally reserved for angry scrawls on bathroom stalls. Through websites like Glassdoor, disgruntled, like-minded individuals can easily engage in a smear campaign to tarnish the name and reputation of a business.
This isn’t to say Glassdoor must divulge personal information about the reviewers to the public at large. Glassdoor’s anonymity is problematic from an internal business perspective, and the individual businesses ought to have a right to confront and verify certain allegations. What prevents one person from posting multiple reviews or multiple comments, for example? The only requirement for registration is an email address. Email addresses aren’t exactly akin to social security numbers. Average Joe has like 3 of them; Joe Stalker has at least 20.
Negative reviews on Glassdoor are more than water-cooler gossip. Gossip and some back-biting are necessary evils in business, but they’re usually very limited, internal evils. Add gossip with angry ex-employees, a herd mentality and the global soapbox that is the Internet and it poses a serious problem. Especially in a small business setting. The simple law of averages suggests that small businesses will be most affected by negative reviews. And furthermore, who is more likely to post a review about a company? The employee who’s moved on to greener pastures (it is, after all, only a job) or the small-minded, passive-aggressive troll who felt his loss of a job was a personal affront against his obese, saturated ego?
Glassdoor sees things differently (no surprise). From their perspective, the site is beneficial to both employees and employers alike. They boast the ability of a company to highlight the brand and list direct job feeds. But for businesses like Oneupweb – a company adept at marketing and highlighting itself and its clients – the Glassdoor profile offers little. Oneupweb markets its brand and advertises its jobs better than most in the business of digital marketing; if it didn’t it wouldn’t consistently bring in awards and be named a Top 8 Search Marketing Agency.
So, what’s a company to do with Glassdoor? They can’t opt out or remove their company from the site. Ah, but recourse is available. If the company wants to shell out close to a grand each month to Glassdoor (for a minimum-term, contractual obligation) they may use an Enhanced Employer Profile. Now the company can add content to its page, allowing the business to flood positive information at the top and push negative sentiment to the bottom, where addle-minded Internet users fear to tread.
Despite the inherent risks associated with Glassdoor, it has no incentive to police itself. The “free” inside information is really a ruse to support the bottom line; after all, “free” is hardly a sound business model. The millions of pieces of free content users provide essentially transform each company page on Glassdoor into ad wrapper to generate revenue. It’s not like Joe Disgruntled-Idiot’s “insider look” is reliable or trustworthy information.
Further, Glassdoor doesn’t have to play by its own rules; it controls the information. Look at its own page. The company boasts a whopping 4.9/5 rating. And of course, 100% of the reviews approve CEO Robert Hohman. With numbers like that, you’d think Glassdoor had found the cure for cancer or something. Gandhi didn’t have a 100% approval rating. At least one follower thought the skinny pacifist should at least eat something. A closer analysis of Glassdoor reveals the site for what it is: a convenient way to make money at the expense of other businesses, and a viral soapbox for the disgruntled, ex-employee.
