Welcome to Glassdoor Economic Research: Turning Big Data into Labor Market Insights

When most people think about Glassdoor, they think about transparency—an online jobs marketplace where job seekers can find jobs, share and research information about what it’s like to work inside today’s companies. But over the past seven years Glassdoor has grown into something much more. At Glassdoor Economic Research, our mission is to uncover the hidden side of today’s labor market using Glassdoor’s growing stockpile of data. It’s an incredible data set of real-time job openings, detailed job search behavior, plus roughly eight million company reviews, CEO approval ratings, salary reports, interview reviews and questions, benefits reviews and more for more than 400,000 companies around the world. Glassdoor is now one of the largest jobs sites in the U.S.¹ and is rapidly growing worldwide, and welcomes more than 30 million members from across more than 190 countries. As an economist looking at Glassdoor, I see much more than an online jobs marketplace. I see an incredible opportunity to leverage real-time labor market data to help get to the bottom of trends in the job market that economists have been puzzling over for centuries. What to Expect from Glassdoor Research As we roll out our research program, we’ll be following what some might call a “think tank” model—a collection of economists and data scientists crunching the numbers into simple insights and commentary that help people everywhere better understand what’s happening in the economy, and make better decisions about life and work. We’ll be publishing regular studies on job market trends, blogging about the latest economic news and sharing insights and visualizations of Glassdoor’s company, jobs and salary data. For a typical example, check out our recent report examining the link between company culture and stock returns, “Does Company Culture Pay Off?” Why Glassdoor Data Matters to Economists Glassdoor has started a small revolution in the labor market that has grown increasingly louder as time passes and the demand for greater transparency in the workplace rises. For most jobs and for essentially all of history thus far, information about who earns what, where good places to work or the best job opportunities are has been almost impossible to gather at scale. The Glassdoor community is helping lift this fog from the labor market for the first time. To an economist, this unleashing of information isn’t just an opportunity for interesting research. It holds out promise for a better-functioning labor market, better matching of people and companies and—ultimately—a better world for everyone. How to Find the Latest from Glassdoor Research Currently, we’re offering monthly updates from Glassdoor Economic Research that will come directly to your inbox. Visit www.glassdoor.com/research to sign up. And if you have an idea or question for Glassdoor’s Chief Economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, try out our new "Ask the Economist" feature on the right sidebar: Footnote: 1. comScore Media Metrix® Multi-Platform report – March 2015