What Do Employees Really Think of Google? This Site Will Tell You
NEW YORK (MainStreet) — No matter how much you may like a company on paper, it’s virtually impossible to know what it will really be like to work there unless you have contacts on the inside. Now there is a website to help job hunters get the inside scoop, without sneaking into the office dressed as a repairman.
TheFit.com launched this week to give applicants “an uncensored snapshot” of life inside dozens of companies by asking current employees to answer a series of anonymous survey questions ranging from “Does your company let you work from home?” to “Has your boss ever taken credit for one of your ideas?”. Based on the answers to these and other questions, applicants can find out whether employees at AT&T have a good work/life balance (they do) and how much confidence Google employees have in their bosses (a lot.)
Other jobs websites like Glassdoor offer similar employee surveys and ratings to help job hunters judge potential employers, but TheFit.com goes one step further by asking more explicit questions. Some of the topics broached on the site include how attractive people in the workplace are, whether their friends are jealous of their salaries and if there are any openly gay people in the office. Perhaps job hunters don’t need to know all of these answers to decide whether to take a position at the company, but putting it out in the open may prevent some potentially unpleasant surprises later.
Users must agree to let the website access their LinkedIn account to browse the responses and are then prompted to answer a couple of quick questions about their commute. From there, they can search for companies by city and see employee review rankings in specific categories like “family friendly” and “play hard”. Once they find a company they like, users can view a list of available jobs at that company on the same page, powered by the job search engine Indeed.com.
If enough people respond to the surveys, TheFit could become a powerful tool for finding a job that is truly right for you.
Seth Fiegerman is a staff reporter for MainStreet. You can reach him by e-mail at seth.fiegerman@thestreet.com, or follow him on Twitter @sfiegerman.
