How to Win The Glassdoor Best Places To Work Award

On 1/9/2024, Glassdoor announced their 2024 Best Places to Work (BPTW) List. It features top employers with the best employee ratings from the past year. You want to strive to be on this list each year...

…Because being ranked on Glassdoor’s BPTW list has a serious impact.

‍Why you want to win a Glassdoor Best Places To Work Award:

Applications Increase 📈

We’ve seen applications jump 500% from 20 to 100+ per job posting after ranking in the top 10 on Glassdoor’s prestigious BPTW list.

Voluntary Turnover Drops 📉 

The grass is (less) greener elsewhere when you rank nationally as a BPTW. We’ve seen turnover drop while productivity and engagement increase.

Positive Press 📢

National, state and local media love Glassdoor BPTW winners. They share the news, giving winners huge positive press, for free. Here are links to a few of the articles from just the 2024 list: Forbes, CBS News, Bloomberg, Fox Business, Tech Republic, The Hill, CNBC, Fast Company, Business Insider‍

Profitability 💸

Glassdoor conducted a 6-year study of publicly traded companies that made their “Best Places to Work” list. This portfolio outperformed the S&P 500 by 115.6% (citation)!

How hard is it to get on the Glassdoor Best Places to Work List?

As of 2024, Glassdoor has 2.5 million company profiles on their site.[1] Once per year, they publish the following number of winners in the respective BPTW lists:

• 100 winners U.S. - Top Large Companies (1,000+ employees)
• 50 winners U.S. - Top Small & Medium Companies (Less than 1,000 employees)
• 50 winners U.K. - Top Large Companies (1,000+ employees)

With only 200 total winners of 2.5 million companies, that puts the odds of winning a Glassdoor Best Places to Work award at 0.008%. So how do some companies win year after year? In-N-Out has won 11 times, Adobe has one 13 times and Bain & Co. is the most-winning-company, ranking 16-straight years on Glassdoor’s list and winning #1 six times. (And by the way, the list has only existed for 16 years. It launched in 2009.)‍

If the list of winners was generated randomly, and all companies were eligible, winning just 3 times is a 1 in 1.9 trillion chance. The probability of Bain & Co. winning 16 times by random is essentially impossible. 

Of the 100 winners in the U.S. - Top Large Companies category on the 2024 list, 77% had won the Glassdoor BPTW at least twice. We counted.

How is this possible? Do some companies simply have an unattainably incredible company culture?

According to our research at Mobrium, the definitive answer is no. Many more companies have a chance to win if they know how to maximize their eligibility.

According to one source, only about 15% of Glassdoor company profiles are claimed and actively managed.[2] Of that 15%, a much smaller percentage actively manage their company profile and an even smaller percentage actively ask employees to write a review on Glassdoor. In fact, the Wall Street Journal published a sensational story in 2019 about companies winning the Glassdoor BPTW award claiming they are gaming the system.[3] It stated that many winning companies had a surge in new employee reviews prior to the award eligibility period ending. The article insinuates that asking employees for Glassdoor reviews is manipulative and unethical.

However, Glassdoor openly encourages employers to ask employees for reviews. In fact, with a claimed profile, a company admin can generate a “write a review” link to share with employees.

93% of all companies on Glassdoor’s 2024 BPTW list for U.S. - Top Large Companies, had claimed profiles. Chances are, a majority also encourage employees to share reviews on the site.

Considering the Glassdoor Best Places to Work rankings are determined exclusively by the quantity and quality of employee reviews written, asking for reviews clearly increases your odds of winning.

What is the criteria for being eligible for the Glassdoor Best Places to Work Award?

Complete award eligibility is available here, but let’s break it down in simple terms.

❌ There is no formal application process.

❌ There is no fee payable to Glassdoor to be eligible.

✅ Award eligibility is determined exclusively by the quantity and quality of employee reviews submitted on your Glassdoor profile.

Here is the minimum criteria your company needs in order to be eligible for Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list:

1. Quantity of new reviews acquired during the eligibility period: 

• 75 reviews U.S. - Top Large Companies (1,000+ employees)
• 30 reviews U.S. - Top Small & Medium Companies (Less than 1,000 employees)
• 30 reviews U.K. - Top Large Companies (1,000+ employees)

NOTE: Each review has 9 sub-ratings for various culture categories. If a reviewer skipped a rating on one of these, you’ll need more reviews to meet the minimum quantity review requirement. Additionally, reviews from interns don’t count toward these totals.

Mobrium insight:
‍Most people don’t know this, but Glassdoor permits one review per employee per year. (See their community guidelines.) This means you can get more reviews by asking employees to share a review once each year. Mobrium automates this process to save you time and reinforce employee trust. 

2. Eligibility period:

• Only reviews posted in the last year count towards your award eligibility. Each year, the eligibility window is about the same. For the 2024 list, the eligibility window to submit reviews was 10/18/2022 - 10/16/2023. 
• Additionally, Glassdoor only includes reviews from current employees and former employees who left within the prior 2 years towards your award eligibility.

Mobrium insight: 
‍This means if you have a history of bad reviews and ratings, it doesn’t matter! You can still become a Glassdoor Best Place to Work based on recent reviews from the most current award eligibility period.

3. Minimum ratings:

• No lower than a 3.5-star overall company rating.
• No lower than 2.5-star rating on any workplace factors such as work-life balance.

Mobrium insight: 
‍As of June 2023, the average sitewide rating on Glassdoor was 3.74-stars. Being realistic, you won’t win an award if your ratings are close to the minimum threshold for this requirement. We like to look at the star rating range for each BTWP category as a more realistic estimate of the ratings you need to have a chance at winning. Here are the rating ranges of winners for the 2024 lists: (Typically we see more variance, but this year, all 3 categories were the same range, 4.8-stars down to 4.3-stars.)

• #1: 4.8-stars, #100: 4.3-stars U.S. - Top Large Companies 
• #1: 4.8-stars, #50: 4.3-stars U.S. - Top Small & Medium Companies 
• #1: 4.8-stars, #50: 4.3-stars U.K. - Top Large Companies 

4. Algorithmic quality check of reviews:

• Helpfulness of the actual text from reviews (are they specific and detailed?)
• Consistency (is the volume of reviews shared consistent across the entire eligibility period? Are the reviews sharing a consistent theme throughout the entire eligibility period?)

Mobrium insight: 
‍Asking all employees to leave a review in one email blast per year is not a best practice. That creates an unnatural review pattern of many reviews posting within a short period of time - even if this is legally allowable. Such large “review events” are likely to be identified as unnatural review patterns by Glassdoor’s algorithm. The better thing to do is ask a smaller percentage of your workforce for reviews on an ongoing basis, year over year. With Mobrium’s solution, an even flow of review requests goes out to employees from week to week, which keeps your review patterns more natural, while maximizing the number of reviews requested.

Warnings from Glassdoor:

Certain things can exclude you from award eligibility. In an attempt to preserve data integrity, your company can have eligibility removed if: (A) Management attempts to leave false reviews, (B) any form of coercion of employees to share positive reviews, (C) attempts to suppress reviews or other activities that could impact Glassdoor ratings and employees’ faith in the company and leadership. 

Basically, don’t try to control who shares reviews or what they say. Mobrium’s anonymous and random requesting feature is compliant with Glassdoor community guidelines and FTC regulation.

A hint of the future:

Glassdoor has given us a strong indicator that their Best Places To Work Award will have different criteria in the future. In an article outlining 2024 award eligibility, they stated: 

“With the launch of Glassdoor’s new community features, we believe there’s an even greater opportunity to redefine what makes a ‘Best Place to Work’ and we look forward to sharing more on this in the future.”‍

After acquiring Fishbowl in September of 2021 [4], the platform has made a focus on more ongoing workplace conversations. It is safe to say this will play a role in their award methodology in the future.