Learn more about your interested companies with Company Reviews

When you are about to book for a hotel room for your next trip, you would most likely to look for what other people have said about the hotel. When you are looking for food, you would refer to the ratings and reviews of restaurants before you make a choice. What if you can also learn deeper about your interested companies before considering to apply for a job?

The unfair situations

It can be very hard for job seekers to collect insider information about a company. Most companies do have a corporate website, but it usually presents the best side of the company and may not disclose how the actual work environment, management style and culture is like inside the company. Random comments about different companies are scattered around different forums and websites, and many of them are hardly trustable. Most of the time you only get to know the company better if you have the chance to get into the interview process and have some real conversations with the hirer; but then the company has already known you much more because you submitted your resume or profile for job application beforehand. As a result, you may end up with a disadvantageous position in salary negotiations. This unfair situation is an example of Information Asymmetry, where hirer companies have higher bargaining power than you do because they know more about you than you know about them. In contrast, as a customer of a hotel or a restaurant, you have higher bargaining power as you know more about the hotel or restaurant by reading other customers’ reviews, but the hotel or restaurant rarely know much about you.

Our “all-win” approach

Company Reviews tries to solve this. By referring to what the current and former employees have to say about their companies, you get a sense of whether the companies suit you, so that you can make a more informed decision on your next steps. To contribute back to the community, you can also write a piece of review for the company that you’re working (or have previously worked) for, and we will publish it once it is moderated by individual third parties based on our Community Guidelines.

Giving more bargaining power to candidates does not necessarily mean it’s bad for hirers. By making employees’ feedback publicly online, there will be an increasing social pressure for hirers to improve their business practices and work environment to retain employees and acquire new talents, so that they can compete even better against others for similar talents. We also provide tools to hirers to reply to reviews so that they can demonstrate how they are open, transparent and caring to the concerns raised by their own employees. As employee satisfaction improves, we will all end up with a much healthier and fairer marketplace where both candidates and hirers can benefit from it.

Valuable insights

The Company Reviews contents and ratings we collect can also generate valuable insights. For example, from the review contents we found that when Malaysia candidates described “the Good things”, most common keywords were “environment”, “learn”, “experience”, “people” and “colleagues”; when they described “the Challenges”, “management”, “salary”, “customer” and “team” pop out more:

From the ratings, we also see a high correlation between the Management, Career Opportunities and Work Environment sub-ratings to the Overall company ratings, indicating Malaysia candidates care these factors most. In longer term, we can surface a lot of more granular insights along the candidate and hirer user journeys, such as the best rated companies in a particular industry segment; as well as to leverage them as an input to improve our matching algorithms.

How you can shape the future

We want to be a place where most candidates would come to learn about new job opportunities, new market insights, role suitability and how they should develop their own career; and a place where hirers can find the most relevant and capable candidates to fill up their openings. We envision a much healthier marketplace that improves information symmetry and equality of bargaining powers between candidates and hirers. We have already provided the enabling platform and tools, and we would like to invite everyone of you to participate in accomplishing these visions altogether!