Glassdoor Is Less Anonymous Than Ever Before

The anonymous review site really wants to know your name.

Glassdoor, known mostly for anonymous reviews of what it's like to work at a company, really wants to know your name and location. Go ahead: try to log into the service and it will ask for your name immediately. There is no way to see the site unless you answer.

And the company is going even further: Dreamwidth user Cellio claimed that emailing customer service for the site resulted in the company adding their name and location to their account profile:

After I responded to that support email last week, I found that they had updated my profile to add my real name and location, [using] the name pulled from the email. ... I didn't think to cloak because who does that? I never gave consent for that change, and said so explicitly when I objected.

Glassdoor built its company on allowing employees and former employees to leave honest, anonymous reviews, and did not always require users to provide their name in order to leave them. Now, to be clear, there's no recorded instance I could find of an anonymous post having a name added to it, and thank goodness for that. (I have reached out to Glassdoor and will update this post if I hear back.)

But anyone who wants to keep their criticism of a current or previous employers on the down low—say, anyone who went out of their way to write a Glassdoor review without giving themselves away—should take notice of these policies, which attach your real name to an account. Glassdoor's policies say it uses your name and address "for verification purposes only, to make sure everyone is who they say they are." Despite that, Glassdoor was forced by New Zealand court order to reveal the identity of negative reviewers back in 2022, so there are good reasons people might not want their names associated with their accounts.

It's unclear how much Glassdoor may care, though. Anonymous reviews of companies are likely the main reason job seekers would ever check the site, sure, but they're not how Glassdoor gets paid. Glassdoor earns most of its money by selling job ads and paid branding tools for companies. This is basically a subscription employers can pay in order to bury negative reviews so far down the page that most users won't scroll that far.

Companies can pin their choice positive reviews on the top of the page, a move that will offset the negative ones in the mind of anyone who checks the page. Companies can also add multiple sections full of PR fluff above the actual reviews. There's an "Updates" section full of posts about how amazing the company is—that takes up a full screen of scrolling. Then there's the "Why Work With Us" section, which is a place for companies to talk about how amazing they are to work for.

Glassdoor does not publicly list how much they charge for this service, likely because it's a lot (and because they charge different companies different rates).

None of this is surprising, and you might not particularly care—you just want to read the spicy takedowns of that terrible company you used to work out. To be clear: I find this relatable. But Glassdoor is a company that's mostly useful because employees and former employees feel comfortable anonymously disclosing how they really feel about the very companies that pay Glassdoor to keep the service up and running. It is, if not corrupt, extremely gross.

You might want to delete your account after reading this. Now, there are instructions for closing your Glassdoor account but you should note that doing so doesn't actually delete you data—it just suspends your account. You'll need to use this form to request your data be deleted. Note that, even then, your data might only be "anonymized" instead of deleted, but it's better than nothing.