How Does Glassdoor Work?

Glassdoor exists to answer a question a job posting can't: what is it actually like to work here. The people writing reviews are current and former employees, not customers, and what they're rating is management, culture, compensation, and leadership — not a product or a transaction. That distinction shapes almost everything else about how the platform behaves, from who can post to what a company is allowed to do about a bad review.

For a candidate, Glassdoor is usually a deliberate research stop, not something they stumble into. Someone typing a company name into Glassdoor is typically far enough along in the decision — interviewing, weighing an offer, or comparing employers — that what they read there carries real weight. For an employer, that makes the profile less of a marketing surface and more of an ongoing, honest scorecard.

What Glassdoor actually measures

Glassdoor's headline number is the overall company rating, a 1-to-5 star average built from employee reviews. Sitting alongside it are two other metrics candidates check almost as closely: the CEO approval rating, which is the share of reviewers who approve of company leadership, and the percentage of reviewers who say they'd recommend the company to a friend. All three are visible before a candidate ever applies.

Underneath those headline numbers are category sub-ratings — things like work/life balance, senior management, compensation and benefits, and career opportunities — that let a candidate filter for what matters most to them specifically. A company can have a strong overall score and a visibly weak compensation sub-score, and a candidate evaluating an offer will often notice that gap before anything else.

Who actually posts, and how a review gets submitted

Reviews come from current and former employees, submitted anonymously through Glassdoor's own review form, where a reviewer rates the company overall plus the individual categories and can write pros, cons, and advice to management. Glassdoor does not require a reviewer to prove employment for every single review the way a platform tied to a purchase can verify a transaction — instead, it leans on its own account and content policies, pattern detection, and reporting to keep the review pool genuine.

That tradeoff is deliberate. Requiring hard proof of employment for every review would undercut the anonymity that makes Glassdoor useful in the first place — plenty of honest, candid feedback about a difficult manager or a toxic team only gets written because the reviewer knows their name isn't attached to it. Glassdoor accepts some moderation difficulty as the cost of that candor.

Requesting reviews without breaking the rules

Employers are allowed to ask employees for reviews, and plenty of companies with strong Glassdoor profiles do it deliberately and consistently. The rules that keep a request compliant are the same ones that show up across every legitimate review platform, just with employer-specific stakes attached.

• Invite every current employee, not a filtered list of people you expect to say something positive — Glassdoor is built to notice a cluster of suspiciously glowing reviews tied to a single internal push.
• Never offer an incentive — a bonus, extra time off, or anything of value — in exchange for a review, positive or otherwise.
• Don't tie the request to a performance conversation or make it feel mandatory; a review that reads as coerced undermines the profile's credibility even if the content itself is positive.
• Spread requests out over time rather than running a single company-wide blast — a steady trickle of honest reviews reads as more current and credible than a spike that stops.

How Glassdoor moderates and detects fraud

Glassdoor runs its own detection against the patterns that give away manufactured activity — a sudden spike of five-star reviews from accounts with no other history, reviews that read like a script rather than a lived experience, or a wave of activity that lines up suspiciously with an internal announcement rather than a natural, ongoing rhythm. Content that violates Glassdoor's community guidelines gets removed on review, but a genuine, guideline-compliant review — however unflattering — stays up.

That last point is worth sitting with, because it's the part employers most often get wrong: Glassdoor's whole product depends on employees trusting that a critical, honest review of a bad manager or a rough stretch won't just disappear because the company complained about it. Employers legally and practically cannot force Glassdoor to take down a genuine review, and companies that have tried — pressuring the platform, or worse, trying to identify and confront a reviewer — have generally turned one bad review into a much bigger, public problem.

Glassdoor rewards the same input everywhere: a genuinely better employee experience, professional responses to what employees actually say, and a habit of asking honestly rather than selectively. It's a slower lever than most companies want, but it's the only one that actually moves the CEO approval rating and the recommend-to-a-friend percentage in a way that holds up over time.

Indeed also collects employee reviews, but on a job board rather than a research-first destination — see our Glassdoor vs. Indeed comparison for how the two actually differ and which one deserves priority depending on whether you're actively hiring right now.