SI 529 ECOMMUNITY FINAL REPORT
ECOMMUNITY ANALYSIS REPORT
TOPIC : GLASSDOOR.COM
JIHONG PHELIX MIN
ECOMMUNITY ANALYSIS REPORT
ABOUT GLASSDOOR.COM
Glassdoor is a fast-growing free online career community, where people share an inside
look at jobs and companies. One article called Glassdoor.com the Yelp of business world.i The
key contents of this website is anonymous salaries, company reviews, interview questions, and
more – those are generated by employees, job seekers, and sometimes the companies
themselves. Now it is said that there are currently more than 4 millions of salary and company
reviews has been made by 19 million users on the website.ii Its competitors are Salary.com and
Jobstar.org. However, Glasssdoor holds dominating position in traffic or the contents over its
competitors. Looking at its rapid growth in user accounts and contents, it is worth examining
how Glassdoor.com made its great success. Moreover, Facebook plans to launch its career link
feature.iii This gives another reason why we should study about online community about
business world.
FIGURE 2012 INFORGRAPHIC OF GLASSDOOR
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STORIES ABOUT GLASSDOOR.COM
Recently, there is an increasing trend of using inforgraphic to deliver extensive
information more intuitively. I attached an inforgraphic created by the Glassdoor.com.iv Since it
was founded by two former Expedia managers, Robert Hohman and Tim Besse, in 2008, it has
been constantly growing and now it has over 10 million users globally. It is striking that not only
it took only two years to hold one million users but also the number of users skyrocketed by
factor of ten in recent two years. That is, the increasing rate is equivalent to one new user per
every second. To compare with competitors, Glassdoor.com ranked 473th in Alexa US traffic
ranking and 1,324th globally while Salary.com stays at 1,254th. Comparing to competitor
websites, it also obviously shows steeper traffic growth.
Glassdoor.com
Glassdoor.com released mobile applications for iOS and android in February of 2013
and now it focuses on developing more analytics tools toward its advanced business portfolio.
On top of that, Glassdoor.com planned to extend the service to broader geographical areas
including non-English-speaking countries. So far, they obtained major domains in the United
Kingdom, Canada, India, and Australia.
MONEY & GLASSDOOR.COM
Glassdoor.com is a profit seeking company owned by two co-founders. Even though
Glassdoor.com offers its service for individual users for free, it turned out to be making some
money. A community expert Scott Dobroski mentioned that the revenue of glassdoor.com
showed 170 percent growth last year. Besides holding ads banner, it gains financial resources
from employers by allowing them to influence potential candidates with provided ads and
analytic tools. Another main financial source is raising funds with venture capitals. In 2012,
Glassdoore raised additional $20 million from DAG ventures and by this point raised money is
totally $42.2 million.
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TARGET AUDIENCE
The target audience groups are divided into individual job-seekers and hiring
companies. Individual users generate or exchange contents for better decision-making on
career and companies want to utilize those massive data to improve their brand images as well
as understand what qualified employees look for. Looking at the demographic of Glassdoor
users, majority of users are highly educated young professionals. That is because college
graduates and graduate students have to assiduously participate in job-seeking activity.
Usually they do research about interview questions and compare salaries. Secondary userbase consists of employees thinking of turn over. Although they gained more realistic
information in actual fields then new grads, they use this community to find job openings and
ask around company cultures.
FIGURE DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION FROM ALEXA
Glassdoor has more than 700 employer clients. Most of them are multinational corporations
or companies in IT industry. First, for those companies the successful recruiting is directly
related to the success. Also, they are able to spend plentiful resource in CRM or brand
marketing and have capability of meeting employees’ needs in common. Actually Glassdoor
publishes articles about how people think about employers or CEOs based on their data.
Major Client List
Category
Name
Financial Services
American Express, Citi bank, Edward Jones, Fidelity
Consumer Goods
General Mills, Ocean Spray, Quiznoz, Pepsico, Kellog
Information Technology
Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Spotify, HP
Healthcare
Cleveland Clinic, Philips, Nove Nordisk, Accretive Health
Consulting
Accenture, Deloitte, PWC, Bain& Co, Edelman
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Category
Name
Energy
Chevron, PG&E, Shell, Southern Company, Marathon Oil
COMMUNITY ACTIVITY & SERVICE
Usually main menu bar tells a lot about the online community because it summarizes
the structure of the website. Exploring its top design, we can intuitively see that it is
comprised of four main parts: Jobs, Companies, Salaries, and Interviews.
a. Jobs
In Jobs section, users are allowed to search job openings and overall information about
employers. With brief description of company and ratings, there are links to user reviews
and salary information. If users create Job Alert, the site will automatically send email
notifications when relevant information is posted. Users can also share job postings with
others but this feature is not frequently used.
FIGURE JOB SEARCH PAGE
b. Companies
Companies section contains general information about companies. The contents range from
overview, salaries, review to office photos. Users can start navigating company pages to get
all kinds of information from here. The most interesting feature is Facebook connections.
When clicking the facebook icon, it shows Facebook friends who have connections with a
selected company.
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c. Salaries
What salaries section offer is obvious. It shows user contributed salary information of
companies. Users can see not only pay difference depending on positions or duties but also
how much salary is spread in the same position. The data is anonymously collected from
users.
FIGURE SALARIES PAGE AT GLASSDOOR.COM. THICK LINE MEANS AVERAGE.
d. Interviews
Interviews section is one of the most active places in the Glassdoor.com. Unlike salary page,
users can use pseudonym. People post the level of their interview and questions they had
and sometimes posting include answers by themselves. Answers or comments can be
added by other users as well. More importantly, they are supposed to specify the interview
results as accepted, no offer or declined. As discussed, college students looking for
internships or full-time jobs are actively participating in this section.
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e. Blog
Glassdoor.com has a blog (http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/) where useful tips for career
developments are shared. The blog postings are mainly made by guest contributors and
general users make comments on those.
f.
Products for employers
In order to understand how the community became successful, it is inevitable to grasp how
the site supports employer to achieve their goals. Someone called this a social recruiting
process. First, employers can purchase enhanced profile pages, with which they have
increased perception or views from candidates. Secondly, Glassdoor.com serves ads feature
based on recommender system. The purpose of this is to let them conditionally target users
with required skills.
DESIGN FEATURES & SOCIOTECHNICAL PROCESS
eCommunities are located in digitally mediated world. No matter how media
technology tries to realize fully transparent mediation, our communications are apparently
constrained by media boundary. For instance, we use different signals when we chat with
friends in person and we exchange mails with our bosses. That is to say, users’ behaviors are
affected in a different way than real world and online community professionals address that
the difference comes from sociotechnical processes. That implies diffrerent cohorts, barrier,
incentives, norms, identities and so on. The term sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness
of social and technical aspects. A number of online community research have been conducted
in online community area. It is believed that people show different levels of commitment and
modality depending on social structures and design features.
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a. Niche
Before examining the design, we should notice how Glassdoor.com successfully
carved out a niche in the business community. Linkedin was launched in 2002 as a
social network for professional occupations but it was more focused on professional
network rather than realistic information job applicants want. Also, there were many
small online communities sharing interview questions within particular areas.
Glassdoor’s design decision was borrowing features from those and add their own
feature: anonymous salary sharing. Additionally, being compatible with Facebook
was so effective that user-base easily went over critical mass.
Paul Resnick and Robert Kraut proposed two opportunities model, where match
value is important.v Expected match value refers to expectation of user-interest and
community topic matching. Communities like Glassdoor take advantage of their
specified topics because visitors are more likely to find what they are interested in.
Paul Resnick and Rober Kraut also cited that user-generated primary content does
more to boostrap additional membership than does user-generated metadata. Also,
Glassdoor is designed to invite friends on Facebook for network feature. It
accelerated the process of gathering more users to the community. Therefore, it
seems reasonable for start-up community to rely on user-created data as we have
seen in the case of Glassdoor.
b. Identity
User identity plays an important role in shaping community norm and user
commitment. Paul Resnick argues that anonymity of individual group members
fosters community identity and strong norms because it nullifies individual
distinctions. For Glassdoor, employing anonymity is necessary, in order to encourage
commitment and protect individual contributors from possible dis-benefits.
Companies can be really cautious about revealing salary information. However,
anonym can lead to a critical flaw of credibility at the expense of lowering effort for
contribution. Glassdoor had to solve this problem with verification. First, all users
have to register in the community to generate any information. Further,
unregistered users have limited access to contents. Also, registered users have to
pass email validation process. Once verified, they are allowed to make contributions
but their contents are still monitored by both moderators and other users. On the
other hand, users can have pseudonym when they share experiences from
interviews. It makes sense because interviewees are not involved in a company yet
and thus they are relatively free from unintended results. Although there are some
poor contributions, Glassdoor by and large made a good use of different identity in
design. Recently, they keep making effort to encourage users to sign in with
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Facebook account. This is a good idea for both recruiting new members and eliciting
genuine responses because displaying real profile information will remind users of
that the community knows who they are.
FIGURE GLASSDOOR ENCOURAGES TO USE FACEBOOK ACCOUNT
c. Motivations
How users are motivated is crucial for the online community’s success. Community
designers deliberately choose design features to keep users motivated. Many
researchers have studied to find the motivations of community members.
Sometimes participating settles as habits or some activities require constant
cognitive effort. Generally speaking, motivations for online community activities are
heterogeneous and protean. However, main motivation of Glassdoor users is
evident. They need information. People can directly benefit from interview tips,
office atmosphere, or salary information. What’s more, people start to contribute to
the community based on reciprocity. With the help of low transition costs and
commitments of early users, Glassdoor was able to get on the sustainable track.
Regarding motivations of employer group, they also are driven by strong needs
related to their business. They are interested in user contents for different reason.
The system features various personalization tools to help clients and it leads to
higher expectation of value matching.
d. User-to-user Interaction
Due to its identity basis, Glassdoor offers limited chances of user-to-user
interactions. The only direct way to interact with other users is commenting on
reviews or blogs. This part leaves much room to be improved for the future. It has to
overcome the trade-off between keeping secret and emphasizing user identity.
e. New user socialization
Basically the community is built on need-based motivation and anonym. It is rarely
meaningful to classify new users. On the other hand, the design of site is easy to use.
E-mail summary and notifications are well developed. Profile information can be
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synchronized with Facebook account. Especially, it is remarkable that postings on
interviews section are fact-based and thus new users can simply adapt to the
community with pseudonym or real identity. Finally, Help & FAQ are briefly posted on
the introduction page but would be better to offer more detailed information with
visual aids. (http://www.glassdoor.com/about/faq.htm)
f. Moderation
Non-real identity communities typically pay more attention to moderation to prevent
inappropriate behaviors. The guideline of Glassdoor tells: Tell it like it is for real, Stay
balanced, Take the high road, Stay calm, Help others, Keep your secrets, Remember
your grammar. As read, they apply moderation in such a way to minimize the risk of
irresponsible activities from veiled identity. It highly recommends us to choose a
positive way and respect others’ secret. Also, it is told that every posting is reviewed
by its administrators in 24 hours before it is
open to public, In order to guarantee the
quality of contents. Depending on the quality
or suitability of contribution, those can be
removed or unposted. vi This way should be
direct and active way of moderation. The Paul
Renisck’s says that verified identities and
pictures reduce the incidence of norm violation. The compliance of norm is weak in
this community because profile page contains user profile photo and information but
they are not exposed to other users. Another way of moderation in the community is
peer evaluation. Every posting has two common questions. One is asking about the
helpfulness and the other one ask if there is a problem. If someone reports that a
posting is inappropriate, moderators will review the report and deal with the
problem. Speaking of feedback system, my account page shows users previous
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postings and ratings they earned. Cliff Lampe found that the feedback had something
to do with user behavior and contribution.vii In the paper, users without moderation
are less likely to continue to make contributions than users obtained positive or
negative feedbacks. Creation of account page to let users check out feedbacks was a
good design choice for promoting user contributions. However, since this simple
feedback about helpfulness can be made by anyone without signing in, metamoderation system is necessary to consolidate the effect of the feedback like one
Slash dot has.
FIGURE MY ACCOUNT PAGE
LIMITATIONS
Supporting anonymous contributions is good or bad. While it makes users feel
secure while disclose company’s internal information, it is almost unable for users to
continue discussion or interact each other. As a result, the community works as a
collective intelligence or kind of groupware for business life but users have less
opportunity to gain social capitals from networks. In addition, since users are
unidentifiable from each other, it seems difficult to expect benefits of bonds-based
commitment. For example, users in this community are loosely coupled and hence
they can switch to competitor website if they offer reasonably better interface and
information structure.
COOL FEATURE
Even though Glassdoor does not leave enough space for networking or personal
interactions, its connections feature is a something innovative. When I search
information about a company, there is a connections section. This is only available
for users added Facebook account. By parsing Facebook profile information, it shows
people may have connections with a particular company. This service is based on the
idea internal referral is a great source of inside look of the company and sometimes
even job opportunities. It sounds telling that users can contact on Facebook in order
to attain information because everybody uses it. Nevertheless, it must be more
beneficial for Glassdoor to keep users’ attention all the time by keeping users’
attention all the time.
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FIGURE A GREAT MICHIGANDER IS SHOUTING
CONCLUSION
Glassdoor is one of the fast-growing ecommunities in the world. Its specified topic
and scope played a key role in its success by increasing probability of value matching.
The site benefits from anonymity because it covers company’s internal information.
Users are secured from possible disadvantages from their employers by anonymity.
Its own email validation system and connection with Facebook account help
preventing false information issues. Further, the administrator is actively engaging in
moderation process to guarantee the service quality again. It is critical that Glassdoor
offers limited chance of personal interaction mainly due to anonymity and it has to
be solved somehow.
i
http://associationsnow.com/2013/04/glassdoor-widens-the-business-of-social-recruiting/
http://www.northbaybusinessjournal.com/71101/glassdoor-breaks-into-global-online-jobsearch/
iii http://www.wbtv.com/story/19171396/facebook-considering-job-search-feature
iv http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/infographic-glassdoor-sky-rockets-10-million-users/
v Paul Renisck & Robert E. Kraut, Building successful online communities
vi http://www.glassdoor.com/about/faq.htm
vii Cliff Lampe, Erik Johnston Follow the (Slash) dot : Effects of Feedback on New Members in
an Online Community.
ii
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