What do you write in a company review?

 

When you write a company review, it is very easy to get swayed by the type of emotion you are experiencing. If it is a bad experience with an employer that you want to mention, you might end up using the review as a way to vent your frustration and anger.

While you might be justified about being angry or frustrated, for a moment just recall an incident where you might have made a mistake at home or at work and the person affected by your mistake started yelling at you, labelling you or calling you names. Chances are, that no matter how right was the other person in pointing out your mistake, the manner in which his/her communication landed on you wouldn’t have made you feel empowered to work towards correcting your error.

Hence, like it is while giving feedback in person , it is critical to use objective language along with actionable inputs while posting a review online about any experience. A review about an employer is no exception.

Same is the case when you are putting in a positive review. Be sure to encourage the employer and also ensure that you call out the specific acts which resulted in your positive experience with them.

The key word is “Actionable” , when you make the inputs actionable then the employer would know what are the actions which led to the positive or negative experiences.

You can post reviews about employers in two kinds of capacities, one as an employee and the other as a candidate.

Below we are sharing about some of the leading employer review websites :-

1. Reviewia

This is possibly the online review website which dedicatedly captures candidate experience. Most other employer review websites are for employees to post their experiences. The interview review sections in some of the other review sites are also pretty superficial and lack the magic phrase “Actionable Insights” . Started in India, the website has now started getting reviews posted by candidates across several countries like USA, UK, Australia, Netherlands etc.

2. Glassdoor

This is the most well known employer review website which boasts of 50 million plus reviews. Reviews are mostly around employee experience, salary and benefits. The reviews are around overall experience , Pros and Cons of working in a particular organization and a final vote on the CEO of the company. There is a section on interviews as well where users can share details around difficulty levels , number of rounds etc. The website gives comfort to users to share candidate feedback by making the reviews anonymous.

3. Indeed

Apart from being one of the leading job portals globally, Indeed is an employer review website as well. Similar to Glassdoor, the reviews are shared by current or former employees. The user can rate employers on Overall Satisfaction and there are sub categories like Work-Life Balance, Pay & Benefits, Job Security & Advancement, Management and finally a rating on culture. The user interface of Indeed is better than that of Glassdoor. You can sort the reviews basis recency, rating score or helpfulness. This website also has an interview section where users can share about details like overall satisfaction, time taken to complete the interview process,, difficulty levels , number of rounds and type of rounds. Apart from other features, it also allows you to look at workplace photographs. This is a very nice access for employers to engage potential talent, who would mind getting a peak into how the workplace looks like. The reviews on Indeed are also anonymous.

4. Vault

Vault provides ranking of top companies across sectors and practices. There is a lot of useful paid guiding documents for job seekers but they are not free. Roughly, each of these guides cost in the range of $15 to $50. While the reviews section is a bit high level but they have a lot of useful material which can help job seekers. There are some free tools which can be used by job seekers e.g. resume templates, sample interview questions for various skill sets and a few useful clips around networking. However, Vault majorly covers organizations only in USA.

5. Ambitionbox

This is an India centric employer review site. It provides a decent degree of detail about the employer. Like the other websites the reviews are from current or ex employees and they are posted anonymously. The review section and the questions are very simple and easy to respond to. They also have some useful tools for users like the “Salary Calculator”. While the calculator uses some assumptions to give you break ups of salaries but it is a decent tool to give a high level idea to candidates on how much they can expect every month post tax deductions. Their user interface is probably one of the best among all employer review websites.

6. Career Bliss

While there is a review section but this is more of a job portal. The review questions are very high level and don’t really provide “actionable” insights for employers who are looking to improve employee experience. Also, this is more focused on the US geography.

7. Kununu

Kununu is a German employer review board which has about 4 million reviews. You can post your experience as a current employee, ex employee or a candidate who experienced the application process. The set of questions are very precise and captures the employee’s experience very well to provide actional inputs to employers. There are questions around diversity, dealing with older colleagues etc which are very relevant and sensitive aspects that define an employer’s brand. The questionnaire for the application process is a tad too long. They have tried to target two aspects i.e. Interview content and interview experience , rather than focusing on one. Users might find the list of questions a bit too exhaustive to answer. Due to this, the user experience is not top notch for this website.

8. Comparably

This is a review board where you can post your experience as an employee. The issue with this website it that a lot of important questions are responded in free text. Which makes it more difficult to convert the feedback into “actionable” inputs for employers.

9. Fairygodboss

Fairygodboss.com is a website dedicate to women professionals. There are employer reviews by women employees. While the review questions are very relevant and identifies areas which typically are challenging for female employees at workplaces but there isn’t much when it comes to authenticity of reviews. One can post reviews even without signing in and hence there are risks of fake reviews by bots etc.

10. Worklopedia

This is an interesting website which doesn’t display reviews about companies but about specific teams and team managers. Which to us looked quite unique and may be the reviews are more precise to how the real world would be for the prospective employee.