Before trying to disrupt any product, it would be good to identify the failures of competitors, determine whether they’re actually “failures” (i.e. will people pay for an improvement) and make your solutions to those issues part of your core identity.
To say Glassdoor is a good candidate for disruption is not the same thing as saying they have some problems. Every product has some problems.
here is an actual failure: when i'm looking at say Meta salaries, i still see no indicator or filter of how recent this data is. Are the numbers that they are showing an average of all reports starting from 2007? which may have like doubled since then, 15 years ago? This renders the salary data completely useless, you can't do apples-to-apples with a more recent company like OpenAI that doesn't have 15 years worth of old useless numbers averaged into it. It could be solved by adding some kind of a pretty basic recency filter, but in 15 years of their existence they haven't bothered.
Let's brainstorm some solutions to some of the problems that would arise with another glassdoor clone:
- How do you verify that the reviews are actually from current/former employees?
- Can the data be open for the public to verify while protecting the people leaving reviews?
- How could the service get funding? Donation model?
- How would you overcome the initial issues with trust?
- How do you prevent companies from manipulating the scores/reviews?
- How do you handle legal challenges if you're based on something like a donation model? Companies would surely sue you at one point or another if they cannot take down reviews themselves
>- How do you verify that the reviews are actually from current/former employees?
People who write review would have to upload recent pay slip or after when committing review provide their email at employee to receive some passcode active within 2 months
>- Can the data be open for the public to verify while protecting the people leaving reviews?
Verification explained above. Token to employee at employer domain email would be anonymous. Reviews would be randomly visible within 1-8 weeks after submission.
>- How could the service get funding? Donation model?
Jobs advertisement ads and website getting commission if someone got hired from advertised jobs like most agency get. Hired person would get small bonus for confirming got accepted.
>- How would you overcome the initial issues with trust?
Just reliable reviews that got verified with payslip and domain email and maybe even passport just to make sure employer doesn't create dozens of fake payslips and domain emails.
>- How do you prevent companies from manipulating the scores/reviews?
See above
>- How do you handle legal challenges if you're based on something like a donation model? Companies would surely sue you at one point or another if they cannot take down reviews themselves
Just create account in some law friendly country. Don't store any user data such as passport, payslip, user employee emails etc - after verifying just delete those
> People who write review would have to upload recent pay slip or after when committing review provide their email at employee to receive some passcode active within 2 months
If I was leaving a review, even if I cared about it a lot, and I'd have to upload a recent pay slip I'd just leave the site and not bother with it anymore.
The idea would be not to store those data on server only process it and keep anonymous data or even only aggregated.
Some processing maybe could be done also on the client or payslip user name masked after verifying it matches passport holder locally before sending to server. Other option using blockchain with open source repo.
I know a lot of HN users are in theory very distrustful about anything new but in practise still:
- using VPNs (even paid one don't guarantee your data is safe)
- tor
- open source password managers (w/o reading source code)
- Dropbox etc
- compiling random open source code first without reading
- having no issue telling hour rate or daily rate recruiter on linkedin when asked and attaching resume.
So what's so very sensitive in payslip if you already providing this kind of information to any recruiter?
> So what's so very sensitive in payslip if you already providing this kind of information to any recruiter?
Domestic violence victims who are trying to avoid being found? People seeing political asylum? Anyone who wants to maintain privacy? There's a number of reasons you would not want this information in pastebin.
> So what's so very sensitive in payslip if you already providing this kind of information to any recruiter?
I know 0% people out of my circle who would share payslips with any potential employers, even less any recruiter, while we frequently talk about our pay with each other and co-workers at our work.
Ok but genuine question why? Does in other countries payslip has any other more sensitive information than name, company and salary? Any more sensitive information than CV you attaching to recruiter?
> - open source password managers (w/o reading source code)
The open source qualifier here is weird, like you're implying closed source managers are preferable, but then your objection can hardly be over reading the source code
> People who write review would have to upload recent pay slip or after when committing review provide their email at employee to receive some passcode active within 2 months
>People who write review would have to upload recent pay slip or after when committing review provide their email at employee to receive some passcode active within 2 months
No sane person is uploading a pay slip so they can leave a review on some internet site. In fact, I'd daresay the only reviews you'd see at that point are from individuals (or companies) with sufficient incentive to generate convincing-looking fake pay stubs.
Would they also risk making convincing fake passport that has the same name as fake payslip? Not a lawyer but this probsbly could be considered a fraud.
>Jobs advertisement ads and website getting commission if someone got hired from advertised jobs like most agency get. Hired person would get small bonus for confirming got accepted.
>Just create account in some law friendly country. Don't store any user data such as passport, payslip, user employee emails etc - after verifying just delete those
The more you try to detach from the countries that will (possibly) make you retain that information (or block you from collecting it) the harder it is to do business with companies from those countries (or to enforce contracts against them for things like commissions).
>- How could the service get funding? Donation model?
I have a more hellish proposal: want to publish a review? Pay. Want to see reviews? Pay.
Small amounts of course, but I would like to see someone actually sign off assigning a budget for something like this in a sufficiently large organization.
HN has many entrepreneurial types so I don’t think this suggestion would go over particularly well, but entrusting a government body with some of these functions would seem to take care of the identity verification and review manipulation part of it. The government already knows about your income sources and employment status, so it would not expose any more information. As for transparency, maybe publish review hashes similar to CT logs?
I think any government doing this is very unlikely. Governments aim to make things easier for capital, not labour. Where I am it's actually technically illegal for you to even discuss your salary with your fellow workers.
So governments do, some don’t, some occasionally try to do both.
where I am not only are salary ranges mandatory on job ads but company also have to publicly disclose a lot of stats wages/salaries. Median, average, quartiles etc. for all full time and part time employees.
In Sweden, Norway and Finland, information about every individual's income is publicly accessible. I kinda wish Denmark would do the same (where I’m located).
on the other hand i know countless subcontractors/vendors that have dozens of work email addresses from different companies and are not really employees of any of them.
so yea, emails are not a trusworthy source of anything, but filtering singups based on addresses is very common.
Blind requires you to have a company email in order to even participate, meaning if you left the company, you no longer can sign up for Blind. So if you want to review a company, how would you?
Blind also targets having communities for people inside companies to talk, and facilitating discussion. Glassdoor is mainly about reviewing companies.
A manager on my old company's blind (they never revalidate your email apparently) just posted the other day how the CEO asked the managers 'who in their team would you not hire today'. They took that list and fired all of them.
I imagine HR would absolutely love to take that down.
The business model is garbage. The only possible source of revenue is the very companies that are being reviewed. Either you offer some benefit to those companies, in which case you are untrustworthy, or you don’t, in which case you are broke.
Glassdoor (and similar) is a waste of time, reviews are all heavily biased at best or outright paid for lies. Amazon reviews are barely useful - that reviews of workplaces, the average tenure of which is 4.1 years can be any better is just a pipedream.
Why is it a good candidate to disrupt? 1 year in, the “disruptor” would run into the exact same problems if they reach any meaningful scale or adoption.
Asking happy team members to review your company is no different than apps asking frequent users to review on the App Store.
