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Glassdoor didn’t start as a jobs site, but after a decade of serving up tens of millions of anonymous employee reviews, salaries and employer approval ratings, that’s precisely what it’s become — and all that momentum could be paving the way for an IPO.
With 50 million unique users and growing, Glassdoor is now the second-most popular jobs listing site in the U.S, after Indeed.com. And although the Mill Valley, Calif.-based company doesn’t disclose exact numbers, it saw a 53% increase year-over-year of people applying to jobs on Glassdoor over the past 12 months alone. Glassdoor said more than 50% of all job seekers in North America visit its site to apply for a specific job at a particular company.
That’s a far cry from 2007, when Zillow Executive Chairman Rich Barton and Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman concocted Glassdoor. The jobs site category then largely belonged to heavyweights like Monster, as well as several upstarts, that collected digital job listings on sites that resembled dense information databases instead of the user-friendly experiences on-hand today.
Hohman and Barton, however, sought out a different approach. They encouraged visitors of Glassdoor’s site to anonymously post detailed reviews about their employers — listing the pros and cons — as well as information about their salaries and CEO. To virtually anyone out of college, knowing how much the average engineer banks at a top tech company — and what makes that tech company tick — makes for pretty compelling chatter around the watercooler. For job seekers looking for a leg up, Glassdoor became an important go-to online resource.
“Rather than directly attack the recruitment and employment space, we felt like we should use transparency to back into the employment category,” Hohman told Yahoo Finance. “It will be what differentiates us, and we can combine it with jobs and become a force in recruiting and that’s more or less what’s happened over the years.”
Glassdoor’s reviews have also proven crucial for holding companies more accountable for their behavior. After all, no business wants prospective hires to spy negative reviews that could scare them away. To that end, Hohman tells Yahoo Finance that thousands of employers including Facebook (FB) and Uber get alerted to content on their pages, that include employee reviews. When Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) pored through feedback from job applicants, for instance, they realized many applicants were upset because they never heard back from the company after sending in their applications. Because of that, the pharmaceutical company rolled out new technologies to make the application process much more transparent.