Glassdoor.com released mobile applications for iOS and android in February of 2013 and now it focuses on developing more analytics tools toward its advanced business portfolio. On top of that, Glassdoor.com planned to extend the service to broader geographical areas including non-English-speaking countries. So far, they obtained major domains in the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Australia.

V. COMMUNITY Activity & SERVICE

The main menu bar gives an overview about the information on an online community. Glassdoor’s top menu is comprised of four sections: Jobs, Companies, Salaries, and Interviews.

In Jobs section, users are allowed to search job openings and overall information about employers. With brief description of company and ratings, there are links to user reviews and salary information. If users create a Job Alert, the site will automatically send email notifications when new information is posted. Users can also share job postings with others but this feature is not frequently used.

2. Companies
Companies section contains general information about companies. The content ranges from company introduction, salaries, review to office photos. Navigating this section is a good start for users to acquire information they are looking for. The most interesting feature in companies section is Facebook connections. By clicking the Facebook icon, users can search their Facebook friends who have professional networks within a particular company.

3. Salaries
Salaries shows user contributed salary information of companies. Users can see not only pay distribution across different jobs but also check salary deviance in the same position. The data is anonymously collected from users.

Interviews section is the most active place in the Glassdoor.com. Unlike salary page, users can use pseudonym here. People share difficulty level of their interviews and questions they had. Further, solutions to interview questions are added to the thread by others. Answers or comments can be added by other users as well. More importantly, they are supposed to specify the interview results as accepted, no offer or declined. As discussed, the community can expect active participation from college students looking for internships or full-time jobs in this section.

5. Blog
Glassdoor.com has a blog (http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/) where useful tips for career developments are shared. Like others, the blog design supports the message from blog manager. This blog has limited space for participation from general users since professional contributors are invited by Glassdoor to create posting on its blog and general users only put comments.

6. Service for employers
In order to understand how the community became successful, it is inevitable to grasp how the site supports employer to achieve their goals. Someone called this a social recruiting process. First, employers can purchase enhanced profile pages, with which they have increased perception or views from candidates. Secondly, Glassdoor.com serves ads feature based on recommender system. The purpose of this is to let them conditionally target users with required skills.

VI. Design features & Socio-technical process

eCommunities are located in digitally mediated world. No matter how media technology tries to realize fully transparent mediation, our communications are apparently constrained by media boundary. For instance, we use different signals when we chat with friends in person and we exchange mails with our bosses. That is to say, users’ behaviors are affected in a different way than real world and online community professionals address that the difference comes from sociotechnical processes. That implies different cohorts, barrier, incentives, norms, identities and so on. The term sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects. A number of online community research have been conducted in online community area. It is believed that people show different levels of commitment and modality depending on social structures and design features.

1. Niche
Before examining the design, we should notice how Glassdoor.com successfully carved out a niche in the business community. Linkedin was launched in 2002 as a social network for career development but it was more focused on professional network rather than practical information job applicants want. Also, there were a number of small online communities sharing interview questions about particular areas. Glassdoor’s design is based on them but interesting features are added such as anonymous salary sharing or Facebook networks. To be specific, being compatible with Facebook is so effective that user-base easily went over critical mass.
Paul Resnick and Robert Kraut proposed two opportunities model, where match value is important.[i] Expected match value refers to expectation of user-interest and community topic matching. Communities like Glassdoor take advantage of its specialized topic because visitors are more likely to find what they are interested in. Paul Resnick and Rober Kraut also cited that user-generated primary content does more to boostrap additional membership than does user-generated metadata. Also, Glassdoor is designed to invite friends on Facebook for network feature. It accelerated the process of gathering more users to the community. Therefore, it seems reasonable for start-up community to rely on user-created data as we have seen in Glassdoor.

2. Identity
User identity plays an important role in shaping community norm and encouraging user commitment. Paul Resnick argues that anonymity of individual group members fosters community identity and strong norms because it nullifies individual distinctions. For Glassdoor, employing anonymity is necessary, in order to encourage commitment and protect individual contributors from possible dis-benefits. Considering a norm in the real world, companies are cautious about revealing salary information. However, anonym may bring about degradation of credibility at the expense of lowering effort for contribution. Glassdoor had to handle this trade-off and provide for fake contribution. First off, all users have to register in the community to contribute because unregistered users have limited access to contents. Also, registered users have to go through email validation. Once verified, they are allowed to make contributions on the website but their postings are still monitored by both moderators and others. On the other hand, users can use pseudonym to share interview experiences. This is because interviewees are not engaged in a company yet and thus they are relatively carefree from unintended results. Although there are some poor contributions, Glassdoor by and large made a good use of different identity in design. Recently, they keep making effort to encourage users to sign in with Facebook account. This is a good idea for both recruiting new members and eliciting genuine responses because displaying real profile information will remind users that the community knows who they are.

3. Motivation
User motivation is crucial for the online community’s success. Community designers deliberately employ design features to keep users motivated. Sometimes participation pattern is habituated or some activities require constant cognitive effort. In online community research, identifying user motivation is one of the most difficult parts because it is inherited in users rather than designs. The motivation of Glassdoor users is quite evident. They need job information for their lives. People want interview tips, office atmosphere, or salary information to sustain by themselves or realize their dream. Then what made people make postings? They contribute to this community due to reciprocity. Users give information with the expectation of another information acquisition. With the help of low transition costs and commitments of early users, Glassdoor was able to get on the sustainable track. Regarding motivations of employer group, they also have strong business needs. Recruiters or HR managers can save much resource and get rewarded if they locate candidates fitting their positions. Though they are looking to the information from the opposite side. The system features various personalization tools to help clients and it leads to higher expectation of value matching.

4. User-to-user Interaction
Due to its identity setting, Glassdoor offers limited chances of user-to-user interactions. The only direct way to interact with other users is commenting on reviews or blogs. This part leaves much room to be improved for the future. It has to overcome the trade-off between keeping secret and emphasizing user identity.

5. New user socialization
The community is basically built on need-based motivation and anonym. Thus, it might be less meaningful to classify new users. On the other hand, the design of website is neat and easy enough to use. E-mail summary and notifications are well implemented. What is more, profile information can be migrated from Facebook account and therefore transition cost is greatly lowered. Especially, it is remarkable that postings on interviews section are fact-based and information requires substantial common ground in the field of interest. Thus, new users can simply adapt to the community with pseudonym or real identity only if they are in the relevant area. Lastly, Help & FAQs are posted on the introduction page but lack of details and visual aids. (http://www.glassdoor.com/about/faq.htm)

VIII. Conclusion

Glassdoor is one of the fast-growing online communities in the world.  Its specialized topic and scope played a key role in its success by increasing probability of value matching. The site benefits from anonymity because it covers company’s internal information. Users are secured from possible disadvantages from their employers by anonymity. Its own email validation system and connection with Facebook account help preventing false information issues. Further, the administrator is actively engaging in moderation process to guarantee the service quality again. It is critical that Glassdoor offers limited chance of personal interaction mainly due to anonymity and it has to be solved somehow.