There’s having your cake and eating it too, and then there’s having your cake and having someone feed it to you. That’s pretty much how Glassdoor operates.

And just as a preface, we’ll acknowledge that Glassdoor goes far beyond just reviews, but you know what site you’re on right now, so you best understand that we’re gonna focus on reviews and gloss over a lot of other details.

Not Pay to Play, but You Better Play Ball

The internet is full of products, services, ephemera that get reviewed, for better or worse, whether it’s on the site where they’re sold, or elsewhere on review or quality reporting sites. In almost every case, these reviews are public and free to see, like a local historical society’s mini museum.

That’s not the case with Glassdoor. And while you don’t need to bust through a paywall to get at them, you are at the mercy of Glassdoor’s “Give to get policy,” which they explain as follows:

In order to receive unlimited access to our site's content, you must submit your own contribution consisting of either a company review, interview review, salary, or benefits review. Apart from ensuring that we have enough company, salary, interview, and benefits reviews to share with our community, this policy has also been proven to result in more accurate company ratings. Your contributions can help job seekers, just as theirs can help you.

That’s right; to access the reviews, the salaries, all that data that you take for granted on Amazon and Yelp, you have to get an account and submit your own review first. And though they say “unlimited” access, you’ll actually need to pony up info once every year to keep yourself current and “pay your dues,” in a sense.

But we’ve talked plenty on this blog (and on the podcast) about when and why people write reviews. The answer is almost never “so I can read other reviews, because I’m thinking I might try to get a job here.” We write reviews when we have great or awful experiences, when we’re fuming mad or absolutely elated. Not “oh, I guess another year has passed, time to re-up with Glassdoor real quick.”

It leads to reviews like this one for TESLA:

You’re right, I agree. That’s probably just some kid getting their laughs, anyway. And I had to supply Glassdoor with opinions and information about my work history just to see some punk goofing around on a website that clearly for adults, ya whippersnapper!

I digress. I apologize.

So, Glassdoor has us, the users, by the short hairs, as we need to supply tokens for entry to their fun and fantabulous interview/salary/company review party. But guess what? They have those companies in the palm of their hand, too, because

employers pay to list jobs on Glassdoor's sister site, Indeed, and those job postings also appear on Glassdoor.

That, combined with search advertising (which lets employers pay to have their job postings listed higher) has Glassdoor sitting pretty.

But, in all honesty, they are providing something you can’t get anywhere else. You can’t just walk into a business or email a company and ask what the salary is like, what the staff thinks of the CEO, or what the experiences of people in specific roles has looked like. You definitely can’t phone them up and get details on the interviewing process.

Glassdoor offers you that peek. Good for them.

If you’d like more information on the many facets of Glassdoor, I recommend heading here.