“When knowledge matters: job change made easier? unpacking the black box”

Knowing where to find inside information can mean the difference between getting a job from a suitable company or following the wrong direction and wasting precious time, happiness or health in the wrong job and job environment. This article investigates the influence of electronic online word of mouth in the form of job reviews during the process of changing jobs and finding the right job. Job review sites are becoming more and more popular in the process of job search. While the professional world has already started to acknowledge job review sites as useful tools in the process of job search, so far, the academic scene has not paid much attention to this dynamic. The intention of this article is to change this. Based on a literature review, this article shows that job review sites already play a central and valuable role in job change processes by giving inside information through employees who already have experience with employers.


INTRODUCTION
An unknown company is a blind spot, a black box, a risk for everybody who starts new with a company."Knowing where to find inside information can mean the difference between getting a job from a great company and heading down the wrong path" (Hein, 2013;Kochan, 2015).Hence, knowledge really matters when deciding if a company is suitable for one or not.Part of this process is to find an answer to the question: 'Does this company culture really fit me?', before signing a contract with that company.There are many definitions offered by the literature regarding organizational culture.It seems that the most well-known definition is "the way we do things here" (Lundy & Cowling, 1996).Lundy and Cowling define organizational culture as a system of values and beliefs employees are dealing with in an organization.Job reviews can be revealing for job seekers in ascertaining whether a certain employer and its values and beliefs may or may not be suitable.
To expand their knowledge about potential employers, job searchers are increasingly taking advantage of employer rating websites, which offer in-depth knowledge, insights, and experiences with a company.There has been a steady development of Internet online word of mouth (online word-of-mouth), also known as electronic word of mouth (electronic word-of-mouth) (King, Racherla, Bush, 2014; Serra, Cantallops, Salvi, 2014).Not only can people search for feedback about products and services related to products, but since 2007, they can also search for inside information about companies and their working en-vironment and working conditions.How? Ex-employees or current employees share their experiences and knowledge about organizations with job searchers on job review sites (Hein, 2013;Ventura, 2013).As of the first quarter of 2016, the American job review site Glassdoor is providing 11 million company reviews, salary reports, interview reviews, benefit reviews and office photos (Glassdoor, Q1 2016).Glassdoor started in August 2008 with about 60,000 salary reports and company reviews (Glassdoor, August 2008).
Employees and their perceptions of a company have become a powerful speaking tube in the process of the job search.Therefore, job review sites play an increasingly important role in the job search process.To understand this role in a deeper way is the interest and aim of this article.Four questions are therefore at the center of this article: 1. How do we deal with changes involving the example of job change?2. Are job review sites already very popular for job seekers in the job search processes?3. Do job review webpages support job change?How do job review websites support job change?What can the added value be?
4. How do jobseekers use these review sites?What impact do job reviews have on employer selection?

LITERATURE REVIEW
The aim of this article is to understand the phenomenon of job review sites and their emergence, motivation, value and actual influence in the job change processes.The topic was approached using a literature and market review on employer rating companies.The findings are collected and summarized in

Company rating sites on the rise
Employer review sites are becoming more and more popular in the process of job search and job decision-making.This section focuses on the most popular employer rating sites worldwide (Ventura, 2013).These seven employer review site are: Glassdoor, Kununu, RateMyEmployer, Jobadvisor, JobeeHive, The JobCrowd, and Indeed (Ventura, 2013; Tables 1, 2 in Appendix).
Kununu's focus is on the German-speaking market, while Jobadvisor started in 2012 and focuses on the Australian market.JobeeHive serves Indian job searchers and TheJobCrowd concentrates their website on recently graduated employees from the UK.Glassdoor is headquartered in California, USA, and was founded by Robert Hohman, Rich Barton and Tim Besse in 2007.Kununu, the Austrian employer rating company, also started in 2007.With about 911,000 employee reviews and 212,000 companies, Kununu is the leading employer review company for German-speaking countries.Kununu receives about 2.5 million visitors to their website each month (Bitkom, 2015).
Glassdoor and Kununu were the first sites providing employee reviews.
Differentiating themselves from famous websites like Linkedn or Xing, these websites not only offer job opportunities, they also share important information about employers.Potential future employers are put under the spotlight by these websites since applicants, current employees, and former employees share information such as interview experiences, work environment, leadership, collegiality, salaries and interview information (Ventura, 2013).Experiences regarding employers are shared anonymously between interested job changers and jobseekers.Every job change comes down to two main questions: Do I like you and do you like me? "Jobhunting is all about human nature" (Bolles, 2016).The biggest challenge every jobseeker has to deal with is finding the answer to this question at an early stage, even before signing any contract.Nobody enjoys wasting their lifetime in the wrong working environment (Kochan, 2015;Bolles, 2016).There are differences within these review sites regarding the style in which reviews are organized.Some offer categories where experienced employees can evaluate employers on a rating scale.Other sites offer pro and contra remarks in addition to rating scales for compensation.Usually, review sites will give users a space for free text where an employee can write about his story and experiences with a company.
The American company Indeed launched their website in 2004.They started as a pure job site.They claim to be "the world's #1 job site, with over 180 million unique visitors every month from over 50 different countries…" (Hein, 2013).In the meantime, they are now also offering company reviews from current and ex-employees.
Except for the Canadian site RateMyEmployer, all employer review sites offer job postings.The website RateMyEmployer belongs to the Canadian recruiting company jobWings, which offers job opportunities for the Canadian market (RateMyEmployer, 2016).
For reading reviews, it is usually not necessary to be registered, except for the Indian website JobeeHive.Personal registration is required on JobeeHive in order to read reviews.Writing a job review on an employer rating website is free of charge for anybody who has experience as an employee or ex-employee working for a company.However, prior registration with a company review site is required in order to do so.Target groups for various review sites differ according to language and work experience.While JobeeHive, Kununu and Jobadvisor are targeted at the Indian, German and Australian markets, respectively, the UK website The JobCrowd not only targets the UK market, but also focuses on recently graduated employees.
Ensuring reviews are appropriate and not insensitive is a strong concern for all employer review websites.Insults and threats are not tolerated.Critique is possible, but only in a diplomatic, formal, and civil manner.All reviews require an authenticated email address.If a review contains improper language or names, or otherwise violates the website's legal terms, such as hate speech, aspersion terms, revenge posts, or fake or bogus reviews, the review will be deleted.Some websites have a moderation team that controls each review manually and regulates according to language and content.Other websites will act on demand, meaning that any reporting to their service address about improper language which is not in line with the terms and conditions of the organization will be monitored, evaluated and removed, if necessary.Nevertheless, job review sites are about free speech, and that means whatever makes sense to the experience of a person is valid (see websites: Glassdoor, Kununu, RateMyemployer, Jobadvisor).
There has been a lot of development and movement with regard to company review sites.Kununu, Glassdoor and Jobadvisor started offering employers the chance to create a company profile on their websites where employers can market their company and react directly to employee reviews (Perez, 2012).Employers can also open a free account and directly respond to reviews (Perez, 2012).According to Mr. Hohman, the founder of Glassdoor, it is only fair to give employers a chance to respond to reviews (Glassdoor, 2015b).
Furthermore, newcomers are entering the market, such as 'meinchef.de'and 'companize.de',which are company review sites for German-speaking countries.In other countries, you will find new review sites specializing in specific areas, such as 'inhersight.com',an employer review site for women servicing the US market.

Why it all started: reasons to publish job review sites
For Kununu, Glassdoor and Jobadvisor, similar reasons were given for starting the employer review sites.All founders were missing information about real working experience, real authentic stories about what it is like to work for a company (see Table 1 in Appendix).As of 2000, peer review sites were becoming available for books, restaurants, hotels, etc., but there was no feedback or inside information available about working conditions in companies and organizations.All three founders wanted to know what is going on behind company doors and how they can help job changers make better job decisions regarding their needs and expectations related to company culture, conditions, leadership and environment (Glassdoor, 2015b; The JobCrowd, 2015; Jobadvisor, 2016).All three websites offer similar knowledge services: employee reviews, job postings, salary information, and awards (Schonfeld, 2008).Jobadvisor's team has given the following reason for forming their employer review site: "choosing who to work for is one of the most important decisions we can make.The problem is that we don't want to hear what companies have to say about themselves because we don't trust corporate speak, it's all a bit too much like propaganda" (Jobadvisor, 2016).Jobadvisor wants to offer real, authentic company stories so that job searchers have a fair chance in finding the right company fit.Motivated by these experiences, they wanted to help new job starters avoid similar disappointing work experiences, so they launched The JobCrowd in 2010.Recent graduates and job starters in the UK have a chance to learn from the experience of employees and ex-employees of companies before they sign their first contract." …a bad employment experience can be devastating, affecting not only a worker's morale and health but also relationships with friends and family", states CEO Robert Hohman in an interview (Glassdoor, 2015)."It hurts employers too, killing productivity and growth as well as putting friction on the company as a whole" (Glassdoor, 2015).
For the Canadian site RateMyEmployer, the motivation behind launching a company review site was the idea of justice.While many employers do take their time to do background checks on potential new employees, employees themselves have never had the chance to do the same with potential new employers.In the name of justice, the Canadian company 'jobWings.com'took their chance and launched 'ratemyemployer.ca'."Although we may lose some of our employer customers by going ahead with this project, we decided to do it anyway, since we have always considered job seekers as our primary customers" (RateMyEmployer, 2016).

Job review sites as supporter of job change?
According to Conner, the world is changing in such a fast and uncontrolled way that "people are losing their sense of stability, and confusion and dysfunction are becoming the norm" (Conner, 2006).Changes affect people's lives differently.
For some, change brings a rise in quality of life, for others, a reduction in quality.According to Conner, people and organizations have two options under these circumstances, either be architects of change or victims of change, regardless of the circumstances of change.Taking into consideration the emergence and evolutionary history of job review sites, it can be determined that the founders of job review sites decided to be architects of change, and by doing so, have changed the possibilities of millions of jobseekers who now have the chance to increase their influence in their job search process and make better decisions due to having access to job reviews.While Conner stated that the changes we are facing nowadays are so tremendous in terms of "volume, momentum and complexity", and so rapid that we are losing the ability to respond effectively, the innovation of job review sites is demonstrating the opposite.Social media such as job review sites show that people are able to find innovative solutions following complex changes.As Bolles (2016)

The benefits of not being surprised
The use of job search review sites can be applied to the model of positively perceived change from Conner.Conner, like other experts in the field of Change Management (Kotter, Kuebler-Ross, Lewin), says that resistance is part of every change, including self-initiated changes.It is a natural habit to respond to change with resistance, even if we plan and consider the change as a positive act (Conner, 2006).Resistance does not come from the disruption caused by change, but the consequences followed by change.We seem to be more positive about changes when we can predict and control the effect caused by any change (Conner, 2006).
A job search is an example of planning a change, and according to Conner's definition, also involves resistance.In Conner's positively perceived change model, he defines five phases of resistance to change: 1. Uninformed optimism = insufficient data.
2. Informed pessimism = concern, some second thoughts and doubt.
4. Informed optimism = as more and more concerns are resolved, you become increasingly confident and move into the informed optimism stage.

Completion.
Conner's model is based on the assumption that every change entails surprises and that the winners of changes are expecting these surprises or disruptions.Winners are defined by Conner as resilient people who are able to demonstrate strength and flexibility in times of change so that the transition is completed in time and within budget (Conner, 2016).
The solution to win a change is to "reduce the risks of positive change because they are better prepared to soberly evaluate and prepare for its costs" (Conner, 2016).Job seekers that are using job review sites are most likely architects of their own life, willing to reduce the risk of a job change by evaluating reviews from others who already have working experiences with targeted companies.
According to a survey from Gallup Institute, millennials are less engaged at work and ready to change for the better at any given time (Adkins & Rigoni, 2016).The general use of the Internet, as well as higher expectations for job fulfillment, especially demanded by Generation Y, can probably explain why job review sites have become so popular over the last ten years.Job review sites offer the possibility to prepare for a change instead of "being overly naïve and caught off guard when what appears to be a positive change produces unexpectedly negative implications" (Conner, 2006).Jobseekers want to be prepared for what might happen to them once they enter a selected company.In the beginning, when the decision to look for a job change is made, this initial decision might be based on insufficient data.For job searchers, getting preliminary information about a potential new employer through media, such as magazines, newspapers or company websites, might lead to certain concerns and insecurities or even second thoughts, because the media lacks real and authentic information about a company and its culture.Deeper research, including the use of job review sites, can lessen the first pessimism and shift, according to Conner's model on the stage of informed optimism.Job review sites offer jobseekers information regarding salaries, working conditions, atmosphere, company culture, and team condition, to name a few.This knowledge is not scientific, but it supports the jobseeker's decision-making process while dealing with potential employers.It gives every jobseeker an estimation about the general attitude or culture of a company, before they decide to step their foot in the door for the first interview.Lorna Hegarty also notes that rating websites give job hunters valuable clues about how to prepare for interviews.term filing or trying to look busy because no work was assigned, the next applicant may be wise to ask specifically what her job responsibilities will be" (Smolkin, 2013).
Completion, the last stage of Conner's model, is the decision to apply, or depending on the result of the evaluation process, not to apply for a position in a certain company.The question that follows here is how the quality of a review about a company or job position influences the opinion of a jobseeker.Can negative reviews provoke a withdrawal from the job change process?

Job reviews and their influence on jobseekers
According to psychology, intrinsic motivation of human behavior is caused by humans instinctively seeking happiness.At the end of the 20th century, Higgins, an American psychologist, came up with a new theory to explore the intrinsic motivation of human behavior called the Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT).The theory is based on the assumption that individuals behave differently given the same situation, because during the process of socialization they have successively shaped their own individual way of self-direction.Higgins further states that there are two types of individual: people that are more focused on positive results and people with a negative focus.People who focus more on positive results from people and outcomes tend to achieve positive results.Higgins calls this type the marching type of regulatory focus (Higgins, 2001).This type hopes the result is expressed by the maximization goal.People with prevention focus orientation focus more on the negative consequences of goals and suchlike.These people have an interest in avoiding negative consequences.Their focus is on prevention focus and they hope the results will minimize the target.Differences in individual regulatory focus can lead to differences in thinking mode.People belonging to the marching type of regulatory focus are more likely to focus on positive comments.In contrast, people belonging to the preventive adjusting focus group tend to pay more attention to negative information (Higgins, 2001).In the event that there is a mix of information, the marching type of regulatory focus will focus on positive information, while the pre-ventive type will focus on negative information.Following Higgins' argumentation, negative job reviews might have a stronger impact on the decision-making process regarding job change for people with a prevention focus.There is a high chance that negative reviews will stop them from considering a company as a potential employer or that they might check out from the change process altogether.The marching type may focus more on positive comments, which in this context are positive reviews or positive information regarding companies.
In 2015, the German high tech federation Bitkom published the result of a survey conducted in the same year.803 Internet users older than 14 years were surveyed in order to get more information about the relationship between employee reviews and consideration for application to a company.The survey confirms that three out of ten German Internet users (29%) visit websites like 'kununu.com' to get information about companies through the experience of employees.More than 76% confirmed that employee reviews actively influence their job decision.In 2013, this number was 70% of Internet users.More than 53% declared that employee reviews encouraged them in making their job decision for a company.The CEO of Kununu confirms the findings of this survey, stating that compared to the year 2014, the number of monthly visitors has increased by 36%.For him, this is a clear signal that employee reviews are a fixed element in job search and employer selection (Bitkom, 2015).
According to research in the retail industry, consumers with a positive focus will be attracted to positive online reviews.Positive online reviews will promote their decision to buy a product, while individuals with a prevention orientation will not make a purchase decision due to negative consumer reviews.According to an AC Neilsen (2012) survey, 70% of global consumers say that online consumer reviews are trustworthy.When firsthand experience is lacking, consumers look for support from the experience of third-party evaluations.This process allows them to gain more confidence in making a good decision (Flanagin & Metzger, 2013).In a consumer review survey from 2014 conducted in the US and Canada, 88% of consumers said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (Anderson, 2014).Other consumers follow consumer reviews for entertainment.They are interested in the stories consumers share in dealing with a product or a service.Some consumers focus on the support they expect to receive from experiences consumers have with a certain product or service (Chang, 2012).What these consumers have in common, is that they all enjoy the "ease and anonymity with which consumer review sites can be accessed, and the availability of both positive and negative evaluations from large numbers of consumers in relation to single tourism products" (Sparks et al., 2016).
Consumers and jobseekers both seem to look for support in their decision process.Positive online job reviews might strengthen consideration for a particular employer as a target for an application, or strengthen consideration for the next employer, while negative online reviews might have the opposite effect.It is assumed that the influence of anonymous feedback about products is comparable to the way job seekers treat and employ job reviews from experienced employees and ex-employees.

RESULTS: COMPANY RATING SITES ENABLE A JOB CHANGE WITH LOW RISK?
Conner states that humans are control-orientated animals.According to him, humans try to understand everything around them so that they can better influence events directly affecting them.In the case that outcomes occur in a way that is not expected, humans tend to break down.This also relates to the basic need of human beings to care for safety and security (Maslow, 1943;Conner, 2006;Schein, 2010).In times of insecurity, job reviews can make a potential change more controllable.As we have seen in previous sections, nowadays, the first idea jobseekers and job changers have for finding a new job is "seeking guidance on how to choose or change careers on the Internet" (Bolles, 2016).We have seen that companies offering job review sites have grown fast internationally in recent years.Review sites are now available in almost all modern countries.They can support jobseekers and job changers in finding a company and position in the environment they are looking for.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Never before in history have employees had the opportunity to do background checks on potential employers like they have today with review sites.Employment rating comments are not considered scientific, however, although for users it is enough that the knowledge and experiences made by employees make sense to jobseekers.As such, reviews are considered as valid, according to their reality."Regardless of whether the content is accurate or not, Glassdoor and other user generated content sites play on the adage that 'perception is reality'.What visitors read is the perception that they form of your employer brand" (Weiss, 2013).The final feedback from current or past employees can give a job changer the final push to decide whether they prefer one employer over another.Review sites strengthen confidence in dealing with companies not only within the job search process, but also afterwards.These tools strengthen the position of jobseekers and bring them to an eye-level position with potential employers (Drautz, 2013;Kochan, 2015).
Lorna Hegarty is a human resources consultant and recruiter with LCH Resources Ltd. in Toronto.She agrees that the ratings assigned by these "backdoor" websites are unscientific.Nevertheless, she advises her clients that ignoring negative comments or writing them off as "sour grapes," is always a big mistake."If an organization truly values its employees and their reputation, they will have a strategy to deal with good and bad ratings", she says (Smolkin, 2013).Not responding to reviews may put a company at risk of damaging their reputation, and the company may lose jobseekers for future considerations (Chan & Guillet, 2011).Some companies have already realized that there is an extraordinary need to take care of their brand and to take part in employer review sites, get in touch with employees, and give feedback to their critiques.Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement.Many companies are still not aware of how powerful employer review sites can be (Binner, 2013;Kochan, 2015).Job searchers will know more about potential companies than ever before.For employers that means: "Don't make promises you can't keep".

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The 5 phases of resistance to change

Table
(Perez, 2012)rted in 2007 in the US and say that they are the fastest growing job and recruiting site.They have expanded their business in recent years, having opened for business with local websites in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, UK, Switzerland, Japan, and Australia (see Table1in Appendix)(Perez, 2012).

Table 1 (
cont).Social Structure of Job Review Companies

Table 2 .
Content of Job Review Sites