Employees have protections your customers do not
A customer review is one person’s opinion of a transaction. An employee review is closer to speech about working conditions, and in the United States that carries specific protection. Discussing pay, hours, management and conditions with other workers is protected activity under federal labour law, and it does not stop being protected because the discussion happens on a website.
This matters practically, not just legally. Employers who try to force an employee review offline, identify the author, or pressure staff into deleting posts frequently turn a bad review into a legal problem and a much bigger story. Glassdoor has also fought subpoenas seeking to unmask reviewers, and those fights tend to attract press.
So the approach here is narrower and more careful than on a customer review site, and the parts that work are not the parts most employers reach for first.
What Glassdoor will act on
Grounds that work
- Reviews naming individual employees or managers
- Posts from people who never worked for you
- Reviews about a different company with a similar name
- Discriminatory language, slurs or threats
- Disclosure of confidential or commercially sensitive information
- Multiple reviews from the same person
- Content that is clearly promotional or off-topic
Grounds that do not
- A former employee’s honest opinion of management
- Complaints about pay, hours or workload
- Criticism of company culture or leadership
- Accounts of why somebody left
- Reviews you believe are unfair but are genuinely held
Naming an individual is the most commonly breached rule and the most reliable ground. If a review names your operations manager, that is actionable regardless of what else it says.
Do not go looking for the author
The instinct to work out who wrote it is understandable and almost always a mistake. Guessing wrong damages an innocent employee. Guessing right and acting on it can be retaliation, which is a considerably more expensive problem than a two-star review. It also tends to become common knowledge internally, and the next round of reviews will be about that.
We work entirely from the content and the platform’s rules. Nothing we do involves identifying reviewers.
What it costs
Priced per case. A review naming a manager is a straightforward report. A pattern of reviews following a layoff round is a different situation, and honestly one where removal is rarely the answer.
Nothing up front, and on removals nothing until the review is gone.
How we handle a Glassdoor case
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We check each review against the guidelines
Named individuals, confidential information, slurs and duplicate posts. Most sets of reviews contain at least one clear breach even when the general criticism is protected.
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We report specifically, not in bulk
Mass-flagging every negative review is visible to moderators and makes the legitimate reports look like part of a campaign.
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We work on volume and recency instead
The rating shown is heavily influenced by recent reviews. Encouraging current staff to post honestly, which is permitted, changes the picture faster than removals do.
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We use the employer response properly
Unlike a medical practice, you can reply here, and a measured response from leadership is read by candidates as a signal in itself. Defensive replies do more harm than the review.
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We work on what candidates find first
Your careers page, your own site and your professional profiles should be ranking above the Glassdoor page for your company name.
Choosing help with employee reviews
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They know this is not a customer review site
Anyone treating Glassdoor like Yelp will advise something that creates employment law exposure.
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They will not try to unmask reviewers
It rarely works, it is expensive, and it turns a review into a news story.
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They will not fabricate employee reviews
Fake reviews written by management are usually obvious to candidates, and they are a platform violation on top of that.
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They tell you when the answer is internal
Sometimes the reviews are accurate and the fix is a management problem. A company that never says this is only selling you removals.
What actually improves a Glassdoor rating
Removals help at the margin. What moves the number is recent, genuine reviews from current staff, and the honest truth is that those only arrive if there is something good to say. Employers who fix the underlying issue and then simply invite honest feedback usually see the rating recover within a couple of quarters, which is faster than most removal campaigns and considerably more durable.