How to Effectively Research a Company on Glassdoor

Glassdoor is a great tool when researching companies, as it offers information on everything from salary to feedback on company culture, the latter of which being especially important if you're interviewing remotely. Since most of the information on Glassdoor is crowdsourced and provided by current and past employees, it can give prospective employees a more in-depth look at the company – but only under certain circumstances. This guide will help you to navigate a Glassdoor page and discern which information is relevant and which information isn’t, as well as when to take the information on a Glassdoor page with a grain of salt.

Navigating the Overview

The first thing you are likely to see on a company’s Glassdoor page is their Overview section. This will include some basic information like the company headquarters, founding date, industry, and size. This section will also include links to the other sections, such as reviews, jobs, salaries, interviews, and more. Companies can also update their Glassdoor Overview with photos and company posts, similar to other social media networks. It’s worth looking here to see if the company is active on the platform and includes information about upcoming recruitment deadlines and events.

Navigating Reviews

Everyone goes on Glassdoor to read reviews, which are posted on the “Review” section in Glassdoor. Glassdoor takes into account all published reviews to calculate a company rating out of five stars. If you click on the dropdown next to the overall rating, you can see how users rated the company for individual criteria like culture & values, work/life balance, senior management, compensation & benefits, and career opportunities. But don’t be scared off over a low rating at first glance, or too excited over a high rating. It’s worth delving further into details in order to get a more accurate idea of what your own experience with the company might be like.

To get more qualitative information, it helps to read the reviews themselves. However, sometimes reviews can be misleading or information can be incomplete. When going through reviews, take these tips into consideration:

• Pay attention to when the review was posted: A lot can change at a company in a few years, especially if certain reviews seem to be specific to a certain manager, rather than the company as a whole. Look at the most recent reviews first and then work backwards.
• Look for trends: Good or bad, several people at different time spans saying something is good or bad is a sign It’s probably pretty integral to the culture.
• Check out reviews for things like benefits and professional development: Glassdoor gives employees the option to comment on current benefits, so this can be a good way to learn more about potential benefits as you go through the interview process.
• Make sure you’ve filtered by location and job function: If you are interested in a company’s entry-level marketing role at their Denver office, it probably won’t be as helpful to look at reviews from software engineers in the company’s San Francisco office (though is the position is remote, you may want to look across the board.) Glassdoor gives you the option to filter reviews by other criteria like job function, location, and whether the job is full-time or part-time. Perhaps you can narrow it down to what current or recent employees in the role you’re applying for have to say.

One final note is that larger companies are more likely to have more reviews just because they’ve had more employees. If a small company has few reviews, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a good fit for you. It just means you will have to supplement your research with some other channels.

Navigating Salaries

After you’ve looked at the reviews and determined that this is a company you might want to work for, the next question you might ask is, “How much will I be paid?” Compensation can vary a lot from employee to employee based on their role, educational background, years of experience, tenure with the company, and more. To research salary on Glassdoor, type in your desired job title (or job function) into the Salary section’s search bar and click the result.

From there, you will see more details such as the average salary, the typical salary range, additional pay (like bonuses, stock options, etc), and how many salaries there are for the job title at the company. You can further narrow the field by location and years of experience – which we recommend you do, since that is most likely to yield the information you’re looking for about your preferred role!

Once you’ve found this information, ask yourself these questions:

• How close is this position to the position I am interested in?
• How recently was this salary information updated?
• What is the average salary, and how does that compare to the range provided (is the range a few thousand dollars apart or tens of thousands of dollars apart)?
• How many records are there for this salary?

As with reviews, the number of salaries in the database matters. In general, the more salary data that is provided, the more likely it is that the number you are looking at is representative. By contrast, if only one salary was posted, it might not be the most accurate. Glassdoor will often denote if the average salary has “high confidence” or “low confidence” based on the number of data points.

Navigating Interviews

Suppose the company overview and the salary are what you are looking for. The next step would generally be to apply for the position. So, what might that candidate experience look like, especially in the interview? Glassdoor has a section called “Interviews” where employees and job candidates can publicly post questions they were asked in the interview, as well as what the application process was like. Look out for this information:

• How many steps were in the application process? - Are candidates expected to have a phone screen, followed by a video interview, and then an on-site interview? Was there a hiring assessment like a writing test, presentation, or coding challenge that candidates needed to complete? This is some information that you might find in the reviews posted here.
• How long did the process take? - Was it a weeklong process? Or did it drag on for four months? You might also want to look for feedback about how responsive the recruiters and hiring managers were.
• Did candidates have a good experience? - The Interviews section also enables candidates to rate their interview experience as “negative,” “average,” or “positive.” If the company provides a positive interview experience and the company reviews that you read earlier are similarly positive, you might have an overall better impression of the company. However, you might also learn that there’s a mismatch between the interview experience and the actual job experience (perhaps one is overwhelmingly positive and the other is overwhelmingly negative), which should also factor into your decision to apply to the company.

Glassdoor is one of the most powerful job research websites because not all of it is vetted by the employer – users can freely speak their mind about the company. Another important thing to note is that for both the Interviews and Reviews sections, the employer has the opportunity to respond to reviews. The way that employers respond – perhaps by thanking a user for a compliment, acknowledging a past issue and steps that are being taken to rectify it, or a flat-out denial of any criticism – can also tell you a lot about how they react to feedback. While Glassdoor should not comprise all of your job research, it is certainly something to add to your toolkit among tools for research, like a company's website or social media profiles.