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I am offered a job from the company as a web developer in UAE. I just went on to the glassdoor and read reviews, the majority of reviews were not very good and some were outrageous to an extent accusing them of non-professionalism and discrimination.
The company is multinational and got this opportunity after hard work.
Now I am confused.
As with any review site, you're going to experience bad reviews from disgruntled employees/customers.
All you can really do is take a balanced view of what the reviews are actually saying (and judging the mood/motives of the reviewer) and go from there.
Don't forget that you can raise the issue of these bad reviews in your interview and ask what the employer is doing to address those concerns (or whether they have any sensible rebuttal to them).
And accepting an interview doesn't oblige you to take a job with them.
If it is a big company, then take glassdoor etc with a grain of salt. At the company where I work, there are business units where I would leave in 10 minutes, however I am happy the team and business unit where I am. Such review are likely to catch opinions of people in specific part of the company with a short turnaround time of the employees, and as such may be biased in one direction or the other.
First, you should check whether glassdoors is known and used in UAE.
For example, in my country, there are other sites which are much more popular. As a result, the reviews on glassdoors are non-representative for the companies I know here (they are actually too good). The reviews on more popular sites are, however, very valuable.
I do read people's opinions on similar sites and I write them too. I've had very good experiences with that:
Once I read that a company I applied at expected you to work 12h/day (legally only 8h are allowed in my country. I was offered the position and asked the HR about how much they worked. They confirmed the 12 h. Interestingly, they just told me about it after I asked. So if I hadn't consulted glassdoors, I would have accepted a position that I would have to quit after a few weeks or months. Basically, glassdoors saved my a** - I don't want to come across as a job-hopper.
When you read reviews for my previous company, you will see opinions that the atmosphere is horrible and there's a lot of verbal aggression. That was true and that was the reason I quit.
I once didn't check glassdoors before an interview. It was the most chaotic interview in my life. I don't want to go into details, but it was simply amazingly disorganized. Anyway, when after the interview I checked the reviews on the equivalent of glassdoors, the dominant opinion was the company was extremely disorganized.
Of course, there might be false reviews. But if you have 10+ different people sharing their opinion, you can normally understand whether there are any big red flags.
People are FAR more likely to complain than they are to compliment.
According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.
A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people while happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience.
So take any ratings site with a grain of salt. It is human nature to complain, and with the age of the internet, people have taken this up to 11. Good reviews don't go viral. Bad ones do.
