Your Questions About Best Places to Work: Answered

We recently hosted a webinar about how to qualify for our Best Places to Work lists, including tips and insights from previous winners. Since we didn't have time to answer all of your great questions, be sure to check out a full Q&A from the session below! Q: What are the three different lists this year and what are the size cutoffs for each? A: This year, we have three lists – 50 Best Places to Work (U.S. large companies with 1,000 or more employees), 50 Best Places to Work (U.S. small and medium-sized companies with fewer than 1,000 employees) and 25 Best Places to Work (UK, any size company). Q: What is the time frame to be considered and to collect employee responses? A: Winners will be determined based entirely on valid and approved company reviews submitted to Glassdoor between November 13, 2013 and November 2, 2014. Q: How many reviews must companies have to be considered for each size list? Is this within the year period or all-time total? A: Companies hoping to be considered for the Best Places to Work US large companies list must have 50 company reviews. For the 50 Best Places to Work SMB list and the 25 Best Places to Work UK lists, only 20 company reviews are required. These reviews must be within the year period (November 13, 2013 – November 2, 2014) in order to be considered. Q: When are the lists announced? Are the winners notified beforehand? A: We will be announcing this year’s winners in December, and yes – the winners are notified of their status on our lists beforehand. Q: How do I encourage employees to write a review? A: We have many resources surrounding how to ask employees for Glassdoor reviews, including our How to Manage Reviews tab, Responding to Reviews eBook, 5 Steps to Leveraging Employee Reviews eBook and our Employee Engagement Templates, which include copy and paste e-mail messages to encourage employee feedback. Q: Can Canadian companies participate? Are there plans to host lists in countries besides just the US and UK in the future? A: For now, only companies with employees in the U.S. and the UK can be considered for our lists. In the future, it's possible this list could expand. Q: For the UK list, does a company need to be headquartered there, or does a satellite office qualify? A: To be considered for the U.S. lists, companies must have an office in the U.S. – the same goes for the UK. Only company reviews from employees within those countries will count. Q: If a company is based in the U.S., the UK AND Canada, would only U.S. employee reviews be considered for the US lists? A: Yes – only employee reviews from the U.S. count towards the U.S. list. Q: How often can someone post a review? A: An individual can post a new review each year. Q: While we’re getting our profile in tip-top shape to be considered for Best Places to Work lists, I want to become an OpenCompany and the last step is to post our Glassdoor profile on our company website. I’m hesitant because we don’t want to draw attention to some bad reviews – what should I do? A: We understand not wanting to publicize negative reviews, but understand that job seekers actually report being skeptical if companies don’t have any negative reviews. Job seekers aren’t looking for perfection – they want transparency! Which, by the way, is exactly what our OpenCompany program promotes. Be sure to check out our Responding to Negative reviews webinar recap for more questions and answers on handling negative Glassdoor reviews. Feel free to check out our Best Places to Work About page or contact bestplacestowork@glassdoor.com with any other questions you may have about how our Best Places to Work lists work. Also, be sure to check out a full recap of our webinar about how to become a Best Place to Work!