Beans & Laundry: Employment Review Websites

In English Common Law, a man's home is his castle. Today, with every aspect of our lives spilled out on social media, poured over by friends, family and the wider nosey public, and with views of our homes from every angle on Google, a man's home resembles more of a fish bowl. According to market intelligence firm TNS, who interviewed 72,000 people across 60 countries, 56% of adults admitted to using SM to spy on friends and family. Getting the gossip has never been so easy. Having conquered individual privacy, recently Social Media has tuned its all seeing eyes towards our places of work, corporations and companies, exposing their inner workings and internal politics. This is the focus of employment review websites, where employees can spill the beans about their current or former company for all prospective employees to see. It is a phenomena that was born out of product review sites.

Leading the way is Glassdoor, with employee reviews of around 130,000 workplaces and close integration with Facebook and Google+, while job boards, eager to increase their appeal, have started to include reviews. Indeed started it's online reviews in 2011. It now has over 1 million reviews with 200,000 added each month. Rather than being the slate-fest one imagines this turning into, Glassdoor encourages positive comments - its hard to search for negative reviews and there is no 'lowest rated' company. Roughly two thirds of comments indicate satisfaction with current jobs. Employees can also leave anonymous salary info, interview questions and photographs. Companies can sponsor their own pages on the site (a good transparency strategy) and even promote their vacancies on the pages of competitors with less glowing reviews. In December, Glassdoor released its first 'Best Places to Work', with many tech companies and fast food employers featuring in the top 15.

A prime example is Hill & Knowlton's (now H&K Strategies) Worldwide page on Glassdoor, and here's the Indeed page, where the company scores more highly. This can be filtered down to the UK and there's a salary scale available - but you have to sign up to the site. Clearly, PR firms are making their way onto the profile listings and, while it all needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, it will become the go-to first point of information for many prospective candidates, especially entry level. Time to make sure your staff are happy, brush up the exit interviews and sponsor your company page.

It's not all one way traffic though, as a new start-up, KarmaFile, promises to provide fair and honest co-worker ratings. If it works, this could become the go-to point of call for hiring managers outside of personal networks.