Glassdoor, the platform identified for anonymous wage and office opinions, is now introducing Blind-like community features for anonymous posting to fuel user growth. The firm is leveraging its Fishbowl acquisition made in 2021 to port over features like curiosity bowls (interest-based communities) and firm bowls. Glassdoor is additionally refreshing its branding with this launch.
The firm is taking that step to bump up its lively user base of 55 million — which stayed on the similar stage for practically two years.
Glassdoor is introducing the communities characteristic — the place customers can publish anonymously — to facilitate dialog primarily based on pursuits, roles, and trade verticals. Users can select to reveal a part of their id like job title and the group they’re working for whereas posting. The firm has been testing these features with a choose set of customers over the month. Now, it is rolling it out to all Glassdoor customers throughout the net and cellular apps.
Image Credits: Glassdoor
With this migration, Glassdoor is additionally porting over 10,000 curiosity bowls and 30,000 company-specific bowls — the place an organization’s verified workers can chat in regards to the office — from Fishbowl.
At the second, Glassdoor routinely creates an organization bowl after they see a big variety of workers of 1 group on the platform. The firm’s CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong mentioned that the headcount threshold for creating an organization bowl is not fastened. He famous that this characteristic is a “game changer” in studying about “employee sentiment” in real-time.
Sutherland-Wong instructed Ztoog over a name that in the meanwhile Fishbowl will stay lively as a product regardless of a lot of the features and conversations showing on Glassdoor.
Sutherland-Wong additionally talked about that, over the previous few years and due to the pandemic, there is a necessity for a conversational platform centered on workplaces. So they determined to purchase Fishbowl and work in direction of transferring its features and community to Glassdoor.
“What we’ve seen the last three years — and particularly in the post-COVID world — is that the workplace experience has fundamentally changed. People are more distributed than ever. And you hear people feeling lonely, disconnected from their office and their colleagues,” he mentioned.
Example of bowls on Glassdoor community Image Credits: Glassdoor
The firm performed a survey by The Harris Poll to discover that 68% of U.S. staff needed an anonymous discussion board to ask questions to coworkers and leaders throughout the firm. Sutherland-Wong added that one of many causes for launching the conversational platform was that there was not a lot to do on Glassdoor for customers other than after they had been posting a evaluation or searching for potential firms for jobs.
In 2021, the anonymous office dialog app Blind raised $37 million via traders like South Korea-based Mainstreet Investment together with Cisco Investments and Pavilion Capital. Reports counsel that the corporate mentioned that the app has greater than 8 million customers on the platform.
Glassdoor has a relatively bigger user base which it might like to develop. It would really like to appeal to a few of Blind’s customers to its personal community platform as properly. The firm mentioned that, whereas it needs to defend anonymity, it needs to differentiate its conversational product by making a “constructive space.”
Given that Glassdoor is introducing a text-based platform, it should face moderation challenges like different social networks. At the second, the corporate makes use of each human and machine-learning-based moderation, however it plans to construct extra instruments like involving community moderators.
Sutherland-Wong mentioned that the corporate doesn’t need to monetize the communities characteristic simply but. He mentioned that Glassdoor’s major income stream stays advert spot for jobs, model promotion, and connecting firms to potential workers. However, the corporate additionally talked about that it needs to construct features on high of firm bowls to assist firms get insights about worker suggestions. There may be some premium features on the dialogue discussion board sooner or later.
Glasdoor’s greatest competitor within the skilled community area is LinkedIn, which has greater than 900 million lively customers with tons of recent features like AI-powered instruments for posts and advert copies and verification for job posts.
Sutherland-Wong thinks that LinkedIn focuses on constructing somebody’s id and Glassdoor offers folks the flexibility to be anonymous. He mentioned that this makes the dialog occurring on Glassdoor “real talk.” Earlier this 12 months, Glassdoor let go off 140 folks — nearly 15% of its workforce.