Are Employer Reviews Biased?

Imagine you need to hire for several key roles. The skills you need in these new hires are hard to come by and attracting the right talent that fits your culture is important. How do you maximize your chances of attracting the right talent? Beyond considering good pay and benefits, 86% of job seekers research employer reviews and ratings to decide where to apply for a job.

If the talent you want to hire is in that 86% of people, they will search for your employer profile on Glassdoor to evaluate current and former employee feedback. They may also look at Indeed, Comparably, InHerSight and other employer review platforms. They will read employer reviews and browse ratings to form an opinion of your company.

If they find negative reviews, it is possible they simply say “no” to your company. In fact, 1 in 3 declined job offers in the U.S. are influenced by negative employer reviews. Oftentimes, job searchers will evaluate several elements of your employer ratings and reviews before deciding to apply or not. This article will teach you what types of bias job seekers are commonly exposed to when evaluating employer ratings and reviews and what you should do about it.

Let’s jump in.

Common types of bias in employer reviews

Why does bias exist in employer reviews? While searching for a job, a candidate can’t possibly evaluate all employee feedback found online and not all employees share reviews. These two facts cause some over-representation and under-representation of some employee experiences.

Honestly, this job searching process is like shopping for a product on Amazon. You search, browse and select a product based on the info you find online. The same pattern exists when a candidate is researching you as an employer. Here are the three times where biased employer review data may affect job shopping:

Search-result level bias: This occurs when a job seeker searches for a job and filters by options that meet their criteria.

Profile-browse level bias: After conducting a job search and clicking into a job posting, the company profile is clicked to view additional employer rating info.

Profile-research level bias: While viewing the company profile, the job seeker reads individual employer reviews for final validation to apply.

1. Search-Result Bias:
Like on Amazon, did you know you can search jobs and companies on Glassdoor and other platforms by star rating? Yep. That means job searchers can easily filter their search to only include companies with 4-stars or higher. Perhaps they’re ok with applying to a company that has only a 3-star employer rating. That’s an individual choice, but we all have a minimum rating standard and if a company is below what we feel is acceptable, we don’t typically apply.

There are many great companies that will never show up in the search results of top talent simply because they aren’t managing their employer reputation and have a lower star rating. Our individual minimum rating standard functions as a bias that limits our visibility to a lot of potentially great companies that happen to have a rating lower than what we search for or are willing to click into.

View of a Glassdoor job search where results can be filtered by star rating:

2. Profile-browse level bias:
If a company has a good enough star rating to show up in search results, a job seeker may find one specific job posting of interest. After clicking in, they may like what they see and want to further evaluate how employees have rated the culture. They click into the company profile.

Here, they are likely to quickly scan company culture ratings and ratings by demographics. Based on their individual preferences for specific elements of the culture or rating from a specific demographic, they may be more interested or less interested. Even though the company’s average star rating was good enough for them to click in, finding a rating for a specific culture category or a rating from a specific demographic that was too low for them could cause them to exit out. This is another form of minimum rating standard that affects the decision to apply or not.

Culture category ratings on Glassdoor:

Culture category ratings on Indeed:

Demographic ratings on Glassdoor:

3. Profile-research level bias:
After feeling reassured by the ratings of various culture categories and demographics, the job seeker wants some final validation to apply. Next they go to the actual employer reviews and read a few. From our research at Mobrium, the average job seeker reads no more than six reviews.

Considering you can sort reviews by “popular”, recency, rating, location and culture categories, additional bias is introduced at this final stage of validation. Job seekers often find what they are looking for and only read a very, very small percentage of the total reviews. This is what we call filter bias.

Any single review has very limited impact on job seekers. As new reviews come in and push a review to the second page, it is almost never seen. It is the small minority of recent and top voted reviews that influence job seekers at any given time when a company profile is evaluated.

Examples of filters that lead to filter bias in employer reviews:

With such prevalent bias in employer reviews, it’s no wonder that many great companies struggle to hire top talent and many job seekers find they don’t fit in after starting a new job.

So how can employers increase trustworthiness of their employer reviews in order to better attract talent that will stay? To answer that question, it will help us to first understand the underlying reason why many great companies have lower ratings than they deserve.

Why many great companies are under-rated

At Mobrium, we’ve seen a pattern of many companies that have great internal employee engagement scores while also having low ratings on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. How could this be? Typically, the problem is not getting enough employer reviews from team members.

The large majority of employers have very few employees who share reviews online. At Mobrium, we’ve connected with thousands of employers across many industries. Typically, we see between 0.5 and 3 percent of employees sharing reviews per year when no proactive review request program is in place. Contrast this with many companies having 60 to 90 percent of employees participating in an internal engagement survey.

The low employer review participation is expected, due to the Law of Self-Selecting Extremes. When the employer doesn’t ask for feedback, only those with an extremely positive or extremely negative experience are willing to go out of their way to share. In this environment, it’s much more common to have an overrepresentation of negative feedback.

Negative reviews are overrepresented when the employer doesn’t proactively ask employees for feedback:

When the employer proactively asks employees for feedback, more employees share and a more well-rounded representation of the employee experience is reflected, typically with higher ratings.

By proactively asking for feedback, the employer lowers the barrier to participate and unlocks the silent majority. The silent majority of employees are those who don’t share employer reviews on their own. They tend to be more satisfied than not.

How you can minimize bias in your employer reviews to attract top talent that will stay

Now that you know the common forms of bias job seekers are exposed to and why many great companies are under-rated, you may want to know how to improve your own employer ratings and reviews. You want them to be more genuine and trustworthy, helping you attract the right type of people to work at your company that will stay long-term.

How do you do that? The name of the game is increasing the number of employees sharing reviews on your Glassdoor, Indeed and other profiles. Why? Having more reviews means your average star rating, every culture category rating and every other filtered rating will have more data. The more data you have, the more accurate your review data will be.

Asking employees for reviews is something you should do. However, there are many good ways to do it and many ways that could actually damage your reputation and hiring efforts and may even be illegal. Here are three of our top tips for asking employees to share an employer review:

- Ask for honest feedback (don’t ask for just positive reviews)

- Space requests out over time (don’t ask the whole company all at once)

- Make it easy, include a review link (don’t ask them to search for the company)

Pro-tip: The FTC passed new legislation that went into effect 10/21/2024 regarding online reviews. Civil penalties for violations can be as high as $51,744 per instance. Make sure your review requests are legal by reading our article on this new FTC law.

Want to automate your employee review requests with Mobrium’s FTC-compliant approach?

With Mobrium, you can automate employer review requests to your entire company with the click of a button. Requests are algorithmically scheduled on a recurring basis and spread across top employer review sites. Plus, when Mobrium asks instead of you asking, anonymity stays in check, further increasing the quality and quantity of expected reviews. You’ll even benefit from our linked anonymous suggestion box which gives employees the option to share feedback internally.

Want to learn more? Connect with a Mobrium expert.