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Funny Business
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What if you could tell the world what you think of your company and your CEO with complete anonymity? What if you could read what others are saying about your company and boss? What if you wanted to apply for a job at, say, ExxonMobil, but wanted to know what the typical salary for your position might be?
There is a web start up called www.Glassdoor.com which attempts to pull back the curtain on all of that. The site was created by Silicon Valley veterans who helped create Expedia and Zillow--sites which also attempt to reveal the truth about pricing in travel and home prices. Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman says the goal is to make money (somehow) by helping prospective employees make informed decisions. He also says employers are increasingly interested in the website, too. After all, Continental may not know what Southwest is paying its HR people...
Here is Glassdoor's latest survey of the best and worst CEO's. It appears you only need about 25 reviews to be counted in the survey, which seems kind of small. Art Levinson of Genentech [DNA
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] is the "nicest" CEO, and Office Depot's [ODP
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] Steve Odland is the "naughtiest." By the way, GE [GE
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] CEO Jeff Immelt, my boss, doesn't make either list. The company gets an employee grade of 3.6 on a scale of 1 to 5, while Immelt's approval rating is 58 percent.
Glassdoor also slices and dices the data in different ways--like, for example, Accenture's [ACN
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] Bill Green has a higher approval rating among employees inside the firm's NY headquarters than among those outside it. On the other hand, Dell's [DELL
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] Michael Dell is liked better by employees who don't work with him. More on that later today.
For anyone to read reviews and salary information, users first have to post their own--anonymously. By making everyone play along, and by forcing everyone who posts to say something positive and negative, Hohman says it keeps the site from turning into a rant fest ("Bob Nardelli must go") or Adoration Central ("Steve Jobs is the Second Coming").
However, because it's all done anonymously, there's no way to prove people are telling the truth. Glassdoor attempts to weed out ringers, and other users will point out salary discrepancies, but false information may leak through.
The site launched in June with 3,000 reviews of 250 companies. It now has 150,000 reviews of 18,000 companies. The fastest growing segment is finance, and it's also catching on globally, as, for example, a Microsoft sales executive in London wants to see what a peer in Redmond is making.
I am posting several portions of my interview with CEO Robert Hohman on the blog today. Here's the first segment where he explains a bit more about how the company works. In the next post, coming a little later, Hohman explains how the website might actually MAKE MONEY.
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