Job seekers can gather a lot of intelligence on prospective employers through Glassdoor, an online site where current and former employees rate hundreds of companies and their CEOs as well as provide guidance on what the job interview process and salaries are like.
The problem is, how much of the information can you believe?
“Anyone reading the reviews on Glassdoor should keep in mind that the feedback is often negatively skewed because unhappy employees — or terminated employees — are often the ones to voice their opinions,” cautions Christine Posti, a Green Tree-based outplacement and human resource consultant.
Despite that drawback, Ms. Posti believes Glassdoor is “a fabulous tool” for getting inside information about what it’s like to work for a company, information that applicants can use to tailor their resume and cover letter to increase their odds of landing a job.
Cheryl Finlay, director of career development and placement assistance for the University of Pittsburgh, said Glassdoor “is not necessarily championed by our specialists and consultants, but simply presented as a resource.”
Plenty of Pittsburgh companies are written up on the website, with reviews ranging from favorable to poor.
“Great company, great boss ... fantastic culture,” someone who has been an employee at Mylan for less than a year wrote about the Cecil generic drug maker last month.
H.J. Heinz, now part of Kraft Heinz, gets poor reviews from current and former employees who say the company has no respect for work-life balance and cuts costs too ruthlessly.
“Gives you an appreciation for the way indentured servants lived. Teaches you how not to treat people,” a current employee at Heinz’s Massillon, Ohio, plant wrote on Glassdoor last month.
Of the more than 400 Heinz reviews posted on the website, only 22 percent said they’d recommend the company to a friend and only 22 percent approved of CEO Bernardo Hees.
Allegheny Technologies, a Pittsburgh specialty metals producer, gets favorable reviews from some employees for having great benefits and good management. But its decision to lock out members of the United Steelworkers union in August over a contract dispute did not sit well with one reviewer.
“They locked out 2,200 employees in order to make serfs out of them,” wrote the reviewer, a maintenance technician who has been with the company for less than a year.
“If you are passionate about engineering, this could be a best company to work for,” wrote someone who’s worked for Ansys, a Cecil software developer, for more than three years.
Ansys CEO James Cashman III gets an approval rating of 92 percent on the site, nearly double the 48 percent approval rating reviewers have given U.S. Steel president and CEO Mario Longhi. Only 38 percent of Glassdoor’s reviewers would recommend working at the Pittsburgh steel producer to their friends.
“New management is making changes and not considering the impact on morale and the employees,” one former employee wrote. “Has turned into a depressing environment where everyone is afraid they will lose their job next.”
Those kinds of reviews can affect job applicants. Ms. Posti said a man who was a finalist for a finance position at a local manufacturing company told her he pulled himself out of contention because Glassdoor reviews of the company were so negative.
Companies pay attention to the site, according to Casey Newmeyer, who teaches at Case Western Reserve’s Weatherhead School of Management.
The better an image a company has on Glassdoor, the more applicants it is likely to get for job openings, she said. Moreover, companies that keep employees happy have less turnover and lower recruiting costs, Ms. Newmeyer said.
She, too, cautioned that disgruntled or discharged employers tend to post more on the site than contented employees.
“That’s a big problem ... You tend to have a negativity bias,” she said.
At least one former Heinz employee insists that’s not true.
“All the negative reviews are the true reviews,” the former accountant wrote. “If you believe the planted positive reviews ... go work there and you will find out there are no positive reasons to work there [other] than a paycheck.”
Len Boselovic: lboselovic@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1941.
First Published: October 18, 2015, 4:00 a.m.