Can someone please cross post this to other lists that might have members who wish to participate? I'm only subscribed to PLUG at the moment.
A locally focused employer review site has been asked for so many times, there is clearly a need for it. I think honestly that glassdoor is close to what is needed, but is taking the wrong approach. I interviewed at a place with abysmal rankings on Wednesday. I took the grand tour and met a ton of great people there. All of the current workforce appeared genuinely happy to be there. It is my belief that if the reviews on glassdoor were accurate at the time they were written, they aren't any longer and thus those older negative comments ought to be removed or downmodded in some fashion. Instead of a permanent wall of anti-employer graffiti, what we need is a living breathing organization that takes a neutral stance and provides only facts and allows for an employer rebuttal system. Unfortunately, that would be a sort of journalistic endeavor and would require immense resources to keep current. So I have an alternative proposition. I have the hosting capacity, and at the moment I have the bandwidth to lead a project like this. I'm also an IT Management, MBA candidate and this would make an excellent final project so I can get that dang degree. I consider myself to be a decent programmer and although I'm mostly a systems level programmer, I have worked on a number of website projects. Truth be told I have no real skill at the design portions of a website, look & feel etc. I have access to that type of talent but it would cost me money that I don't have right now. So here's my suggestion. If I can get at least 4 more people interested in actually contributing resources, (time & talent). I'll finance the creation of a non-profit endeavor to provide a living breathing review service such as the one we have been talking about. At least initially I envision it looking a bit like a blend of Ebay & Amazon's feedback systems. Unlike glassdoor, employers will be allowed to directly participate, but we will protect the identity of commentors by creating a delay of at least 30 days from the time a comment is posted until the time it is shown publicly and thus available to employers for review and rebuttal. During that initial 30 day period, the feedback would be available to "job seeker" subscribers, just not publicly visible, nor would it be visible to "employer subscribers". All comments would be anonymized. After a calendar year, any negative feedback would drop off, positive feedback would remain indefinitely. Rankings would be permanent and would be the mean average of total feedback scores. We could rank on a defined set of metrics plus an overall holistic. A cooling off period of course would need to be enforced so that the recently unemployed, don't get overly hot-headed. I think allowing a comment to "cool" for 30 days then requiring the initial submitter to "confirm or edit" before allowing the post to become public would probably be sufficient. We could prevent trolling & astroturfing by requiring that a person about to post as a former employee on a company, have that company listed as an employer or former employer in their LinkedIn profile, or something similar. I believe LinkedIn has an API that would allow automation of this process. Furthermore if an employer is removed from someone's linked in profile then we must assume the post was an astroturf and remove the comment and it's ranking. I think it would be a good idea to provide not only a company by company review, but also a department by department review. As a contractor, I've personally worked in a cross-departmental capacity within an organization and have seen one department literally at war with another department. It was umm, shall we say interesting, to be treated as some sort of missile being lobbed across cubicles. Of course upper management was completely clueless about this. Discord like that can lead directly to an organizational failure. I can see this feedback system providing invaluable insight for decision makers as to what's "really going on" in their org. Since the whole subject is completely off topic for the list, let's take any further communication on it out of band. If you're interested in participating shoot me an email [email protected], I'll get a mailing list up and send you back a link to subscribe. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
