A big thank-you to Steve Wartenberg for his article entitled Cyber Venting. Steve, and the experts he cites make the point that comments on sites such as JobVent.com should be strongly considered by executives and managers within the organizations about which people are writing. They also urge people who read these sites to take the comments they read with “a grain of salt” due to the fact that you do not really know who is writing these reviews and whether their opinions should actually sway your opinion about a company.
I see examples of this a lot on JobVent.com. Someone gets fired from a job, and decides to write an extremely negative review. They have every right to express their opinion, but people reading the review really should consider the context in which this person was motivated to write it. Why were they fired? Unless the company or other people within the organization decide to respond to this review, readers of the recently terminated employee’s review will only be reading half of the story, and they need to keep that in mind. We have no idea if the employee was not performing their job well enough to justify their continued employment, or if there were any number of unmentioned issues that the other side could have had with this employee.
Always consider both sides of the story, even when you’ve only been handed one of them.