We all know Glassdoor, the review site where employees can anonymously comment on the pros and cons of working at a given company, as well as the salaries that they were/are paid.

Glassdoor has become a staple of job seekers’ candidate journeys, and therefore has become an increasingly important consideration in a company’s employer branding strategy.

After seeing this post in a Facebook group we’ve grown to love, we thought we’d collect responses, and share the results so that any HR practitioner thinking about spending money on Glassdoor can benefit.

Yes, This Post is a bit Ironic

We want to point out that yes, we realize this post is ironic in nature. Glassdoor has a mission of “transparency” and yet has made their own pricing model opaque and secret (although let’s face it, most enterprise SaaS companies have bespoke pricing that changes based on many factors).

Spoiler alert, while we now have a better understanding of WHAT they charge, HOW is still not entirely clear.

Ok, now on with the post.

What you’re buying on Glassdoor

While companies can perform a variety of free activities on Glassdoor, there are also a host of paid options for companies that want to further their efforts on Glassdoor.

Namely, companies can pay for a sponsored profile page on Glassdoor. Among other things, this paid page gives employers the ability to add more employer branding content to the page, select a featured review to show up top of the reviews page, and to take away competitor’s job listings from their company pages.

Additionally, companies can pay for cost per click (CPC) campaigns on Glassdoor, similar to what sites such as Indeed or other job boards offer.

Increasing Pricing Transparency

In order to get a sense for how Glassdoor pricing works, we asked organizations to anonymously divulge what they’d been quoted for pricing, along with the specifics of the package. We then used this data to make our assumptions about how pricing works.

The Glassdoor Pricing Data Set

Here is the survey we sent out to HR practitioners to find out what they’d been quoted for various Glassdoor packages.

We’d love to make this a living document that other companies can reference throughout time, so please contribute (yes, it’s anonymous)! After you submit your response, you’ll be able to see the RAW data behind the numbers.

Before you fill out this survey, here are a few best practices so we can all benefit from the integrity of this data:

1. Please break out the cost of your branded employer page vs other aspects of the Glassdoor platform (CPC ads on Glassdoor, etc)
2. If you list other services, please be as specific as possible (how many impressions/clicks are you getting for an ads package, for example)
3. Please take a second to make sure you’re not missing a “0” 

Questions on this data? Email hello@nextwavehire.com

Our Thoughts on How This All Works

Looking at the data, size of company obviously matters. It appears that the minimum pricing is in the $7k/yr range for a company page. There is one quote for $6k in our data, but we happen to know that quote is 1.5 years old, and it makes sense that Glassdoor has increased their pricing over time.

It would appear that the price for sponsoring a company page can be as high as $55k/yr (we have this from our 110k employee company, which I assume would get the highest charge of any company that has submitted info thus far). This pricing scale is also corroborated by the 35k company that was quoted $21k for 8 months of a branded profile ($31,500 annualized).

As we’re fairly confident these data points are high quality, we’ll use them to understand the baseline pricing schema. As we can see in the graph above, we can get a decent idea for where the price per branded page should end up for a company of a given size.

Now, you’ll notice in our raw data that we have several companies that are paying well above $100k for Glassdoor, and some of them are much smaller than our 100k employee company paying $55k/yr for a branded page. This is because there are other offerings that Glassdoor can offer. In particular, they offer the ability to buy ads on a cost per click basis. Our understanding is that much of this is off of your talent competitor’s profile pages.

Also of note in the raw data is that companies seem to be paying for other services such as job description translation. Although, as noted below, due to the nature of crowd sourced anonymous data, it’s unclear if there is a service component here that is being paid for, or a technology solution that allows different jobs to be shown to people in different countries.

What we can also see from the raw data is that there are companies who are similar sized, but getting meaningful different quotes for a similar service offering. For example, we have a 65 person, 450 person, and 1,000 person companies who’ve all listed a similar pricing for their organizations. It’s probable that certain companies are getting better deals for reasons unknown to the public at large.

Unsurprisingly, larger organizations get a much better cost/employee. Of course, as an organization, I would want to think about pricing on a cost/view or cost/click basis, so this may not be the best way to view this data, but it is important to keep in mind for smaller organizations who may not get as much ROI out of a branded profile as a company that is 1,000+ employees.

The Strange Similarities with this Study and Glassdoor Itself

While putting together this analysis, we kept thinking about how this data reminded us of the data Glassdoor gathers for job seekers, and felt we had to point it out:

Flaws in our methodology

See above with the “Similarities to Glassdoor” commentary. Basically, because this data is crowd sourced and anonymous, it’s potentially error prone and biased. That means there is a lot of nuance here that is left out around the details of various plans and why they were offered.

Of course, the more people who fill out the survey, the more the integrity of the data will grow. We’ll plan to update this post in a few months once we get more data.

Conclusion

Our hope is that this growing list of other practitioners’ quotes is a resource that you can use to effectively capture value as you think about how to best build your brand online.

While review sites are important to your employer brand, we also strongly encourage companies to take a look at their own careers page, social presence, and the content that they have a hand in creating. If you’d like to learn more about how to use NON-ANONMYOUS employee reviews to build your brand, check out how NextWave Hire can help.

What’s next?

We’ll continuously update this data set, and will be looking for drill down into the pricing behind the ancillary services beyond the branded careers page. Please share this article with others as the only way we can do this is through more people filling out the survey!

TLDR: We crowdsourced what others are paying for Glassdoor so that everyone can benefit from increased transparency around Glassdoor Pricing. Enterprise SaaS pricing is opaque by nature, and this isn’t a knock on Glassdoor or their pricing practices! Please contribute your data so that others can benefit (and signup for our blog to stay up to date on further analysis). We hope you find this useful.

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