Glassdoor.com – Throwing Stones

A new site launched yesterday called glassdoor.com in which employees can talk about everything and anything pertaining to the workplace, particularly compensation.

From Salon’s Machinist blog:

Site founder Robert Hohman calls this the “give to get” model. You tell Glassdoor where you work, how much you make, what you do, how you like it, what you think of your bosses, and, if you want, how you feel about the whole situation. This is all anonymous, of course (the site will vet you: Glassdoor verifies your e-mail address, and its staffers, who read every comment posted to the site, will contact you if they sense something fishy, like if you say that there isn’t a single thing amiss at your bankrupt company).

In return for your dish, you get full access to Glassdoor. And once you’re in, you’ll have a ball, whether you’re actively looking for a job or are just interested in the scuttlebutt at a certain firm. I suspect folks will linger at the salary data, which is graphed and sorted by employee function.

According to Techcrunch:

Glassdoor.com has taken $3 million Series B in a round led by Benchmark Capital…CEO and Founder Robert Hohman was previously the President of Hotwire.com, and the team includes Richard Barton, CEO of Zillow and Tim Besse, previously in senior management at Expedia.

Whatever the response is, it looks like it’s going to be a PITA for all of us in HR. Salary.com was bad enough with their inflated sense of salaries (and the inevitable employee who tried to prove that he was being underpaid because HR people don’t know what they’re doing…) but now real salaries out in the open for all to see. Never mind the confidentiality concerns and issues around trade secrets.

Oh joy.

I feel a migraine coming on.

UPDATE: Okay, my migraine is slowly fading. When I mentioned this site to my colleague, she laughed and said that this would be a good way to get free salary statistics. Good spin on that one. Thanks!