Jobvent: Dissing Employers Online

Every workplace has them, the veteran complainers who find fault with everything. The picked-on, under-appreciated drudges who always lose out at promotion time and never know why- even while everyone else in the office does. Now those disenchanted office fixtures have a place to call their own: jobvent.

Jobvent as Job Search Tool

Jobvent is a website operated by Arlington Development, LLC, that encourages workers to post their views-positive or negative- about their employers. In theory, jobvent is a useful tool for job seekers, potentially steering them away from organizations with a dissatisfied workforce and toward organizations more accommodating to their employees.

But is jobvent reliable?

Jobvent Not Representative

Jobvent assigns numerical ratings to employers- including private and government employers- based in part of the number of positive and negative ratings in the reviews received. For companies receiving few reviews compared to the size of its workforce, the resulting rating may be skewed. For example, Wal-Mart employess 1.2 million sales associates in the United States. Its -2078 rating is derived from the reviews of 135 employees. Is a rating based on opinions of .01 percent of the workforce trustworthy?

Who is more likely to express an opinion at an online, anonymous collator of job experiences, a productive, happy employee or a disgruntled ne-er-do-well? Even the owner of jobvent knows that- his impetus for starting the site because of dissatisfatcion with a prior job.

Jobvent Details

Jobvent rules require venters to identify the specific city and state in which they work. No use of manager names or initials is permitted at jobvent.

Even with these rules in place, some of the complaints on jobvent get very specific. Employees do sometimes post the initials of particular managers they consider responsible for fostering undesirable workplace conditions. Even without such identifiers, the office location or the particulars described by employees may be sufficient to alert those familiar with the workplace to the identity of particular managers.