Young Successful Entrepreneur

Company research and information is growing ever more popular because of the state of the economy.  You want to know what companies are out their, their slaries, culture, work, and competitiveness.  As it turns out, a company’s culture and growth potential is more important to job seekers than the actual monetary compensation.

Here are two sites that are trying to give you the best company research and information possible: FD Career and GlassDoor.

FD Career

Overview:

FD Career uses a See-Saw system to display company opinions, information, and to demonstrate a positive or negative opinion.  Here is an example of a See-Saw for Future Delivery:

FD Career separates a company into 5 main sections: work, compensation, culture, growth, and competitiveness.  Every box on the see-saw is a comment about the company that has been posted by a member of the FD community.  The bigger the comment, the higher the quality.  The community self-regulates the comments by feeding ones that bring value, and starving those that are not valuable.

If the See-Saw is tipped to the right, then then that means that overall, it is a Positive (or good) company.  If the See-Saw is tipped to the left, then that means it is a Negative (or bad) company.

Pros

The See-Saw feature makes it very easy to immediately see the overall opinion of the company:  right means positive, left means negative.  Searching through companies and categories is also very fast and easy, so getting to what you’re looking for is a breeze.

The greatest pro with the FD See-Saw is the 5 categories that a company is broken down into.  If I’m curious about the kind of work that they do, then all I have to do is click on “Work.”  If I’m curious about their promotion structure, all I have to do is click on “Growth.”

FD Career has also made it super easy for anyone to add a comment.  You can be an employee, former employee, client, or person that has interviewed with the company.  All you need to do is create an account and you can contribute your opinions.  The site’s legitimacy is regulated by the community, similar to the way the Wiki community regulates Wikipedia.

Cons

Anyone in the community can add a comment; therefore, there may be some comments that bring no value to the See-Saw.  Future Delivery expects that the community will regulate the quality of the site through feeding and starving.

FD Career just launched; therefore, there is currently no way to filter between different cities or positions.  This feature will be implemented along with the launch of future features within 3 weeks.

Glass Door

Overview

Glass door is a company rating and review resource that offers its users some very detailed information about companies.  They have a very clever and effective model: give before you can take.  Glass Door requires you to enter detailed information about your previous or current employer before you can read all of the company profiles and info on the site.

They don’t just have compensation info, but they have full reviews about the companies as well.  They have employees write out the pros and cons about their employers. They also have a clever “CEO Rating” system where employees can rate the company CEO.

Pros

They have a lot of detailed information.  The compensation info and ratings info that they have are accompanied by the position, location, and date worked of the employee.  Their company reviews are long winded, and are meant for the person to commit to sitting down for a few hours and really reading all of the information.

Cons

Similar to FD Career, anyone can post a review.  There is no way to authenticate if a person who posted on Google has really worked for Google.  At the bottom of each review, there is a question that asks “Was this review helpful?”  Like FD Career, the community rates whether the review was valuable or not.

Who Wins?

Well, I may be slightly biased because I am the Co-Founder of Future Delivery; but, I will do my best to give you an objective opinion.

FD Career just launched, so some of the features are not as polished as they could be.  The company research feature will get better and more easy to use as the weeks go by.  Glassdoor currently gives much more detailed company information than FD Career.  They have the location, position, and date worked their of each person who wrote a comment.

FD Career’s advantage is that it separates each section of a company, so you can quickly filter through what is important to you.  Each company opinion is a short and core, giving you a direct opinon about the company.  FD Career is also an entire professional development community, meant to help you achieve your dream career.  You’ll notice that the main feature of FD Career is the RPG or Quest feature.  This allows you to compare yourself against your peers based on work, leadership, and social experiences.

If you’re an undergraduate or young professional, then FD Career is meant for you.  FD Career will not only give you valuable company information, but it will also help you gain the skills required that you need to excel at your career.  You can also participate in a community and gain prestige by achieving a high level.

If you are an established, experienced professional, then Glassdoor might fit your needs better.