Building on the theme of honesty from yesterday brings us to the next topic: Honest opinions about working for [insert company or manager of your choice]. Many students google the terms, company review, employee feedback, or terms similar to this.
Don't.
This is a horrible idea, and one way to skew your perception of a company and possibly scare you away from a good offer and future opportunity. How likely are you to leave feedback if you had a positive experience? Not very unless you have tons of time, and love to express yourself. Now, how often are you likely to say something when you are treated poorly, given inadequate service, or purchased a busted product? Exactly.
We are quick to yell and let people know when we are not happy, but rarely do we let others know that we are content or satisfied since it is the norm. Does this apply to job or company reviews accessible online? You bet it does. Let me prove it to you.
Go to JobVent.com, which is a site that provides users with a place to rate their current employer. Select any letter of the alphabet to view a list of companies starting with that letter. What do you notice about the resulting list? If you said, Wow, there sure are a lot of negative numbers next to most of these names of companies, then you are correct. Not only are there many more negative numbers than positive numbers, look how low some of those numbers go.
Bottom line, the majority or company or employer reviews are submitted by people who are pissed off, and nine times out of ten they are probably created when the employee had a bad day or right after they were fired or decided to quit. It's human nature to want to share our dissatisfaction for a situation, and many of these people think that they are damaging a company's reputation and fighting back.
As long as you are aware of the fact that sites and forums like this are completely bogus, you will be much better off in your job search. Until companies become more transparent and honest about their successes, and more importantly their failures, the thought to seek out reviews of a company should not even cross your mind.
