Glassdoor

Founding

The company was cofounded in 2007 by Tim Besse, Robert Hohman, who serves as the company’s CEO, and Expedia founder Rich Barton, who serves as the company’s Chairman. The idea came from a brainstorming session between the two of them, when Hohman relayed the story of accidentally leaving the results of an employee survey on the printer while working at Expedia—when the two began to think about what would have happened if the results had gotten out into the public. The two hypothesized that if the material had indeed been revealed publicly, it could have been a service to those looking to make career decisions. The company’s headquarters were established in Mill Valley.

Website

Glassdoor launched its company ratings site in June 2008, as a site that “collects company reviews and real salaries from employees of large companies and displays them anonymously for all members to see,” according to TechCrunch. The company then averaged the reported salaries, posting these averages alongside the reviews employees made of the management and culture of the companies they worked for—including some of the larger tech companies like Google and Yahoo. The site also allows the posting of office photographs and other company-relevant media.

The site later also began focusing on CEOs and workplaces, as well as what it is like to work at jobs in general. Employee reviews are averaged for each company. Glassdoor ratings are based on user-generated reviews. Each year Glassdoor ranks overall company ratings to determine its annual Employees’ Choice Awards, also known as the Best Places to Work Awards. The website verifies that each review of a company comes from real employees "through technological checks of e-mail addresses and through screenings by a content management team," according to Glassdoor spokesman Scott Dobroski . The company has stated that it rejects about 20% of entries after screening. Rules for posting reviews are different for smaller companies than they are for larger companies in order to preserve the anonymity of people in close departments.

In 2010 Glassdoor released a fee-based program that it calls "Enhanced Employer Profiles", which allows employers to include their own content on Glassdoor profiles, like executive biographies, classifieds, social media links, and referrals. The company also allows users to post potential job interview questions that might be asked by certain companies, acquired by interviewed job candidates, in addition to other information that can be used to prepare job applications. The reputation a company has on Glassdoor has also been found correlative by Case Western Professor Casey Newmeyer. It has also been used to vet potential client companies.

In 2014 the company hired Adam Spiegel as its CFO, with the intention of preparing for an eventual IPO. As of 2015, the site had 30 million users from 190 countries and corporate clients including one third of all Fortune 500 companies. That year, Glassdoor also began creating localized websites and mobile apps for different national jurisdictions, such as Germany.

In September 2016, Glassdoor acquired Brazil’s Love Mondays to expand into Latin America.

Reports

Glassdoor produces reports based upon the data its users generate through their posts. These reports have been on topics including work-life balance, CEO pay-ratios, lists of the best office places and cultures, and the accuracy of corporate job searching maxims. Data from Glassdoor has also been used by outside sources to produce estimates on the effects of salary trends and changes on corporate revenues. Glassdoor also puts the conclusions of its research of other companies towards its own company policies. In 2015 Tom Lakin produced the first study of Glassdoor in the United Kingdom, concluding that Glassdoor and similar sites were seen as more trustworthy sources of information than career guides or official company documents.

Financing

The company received its first financing in 2008, receiving $3 million in funding, before launching its website. In 2012 Glassdoor received $20 million of venture capital, taking its total outside funding to $42.2 million. The following year, the company raised an additional $50 million. In 2015 the company raised an additional $70 million, in an investment round led by Google Capital, giving the company a valuation of just short of $1 billion. The total of investment at this point was $160 million. In 2016 Glassdoor raised an additional $40 million from investors.

Awards

In April 2013, Glassdoor won a Red Herring North America Award for Social Media Innovation.