Smoke and Mirrors: Why the Glass Door Isn’t Always Transparent

This is a Career Big Sis briefing about career due diligence - the kind that nobody teaches you and that you usually have to learn the hard way.

I need to tell you something about Glassdoor that might save you from a mistake I’ve watched too many people make, including past versions of myself.

Online company reviews are not truth.

They’re just additional data points. Some are useful, some are noise and some are curated in ways that would surprise you if you knew how the sausage gets made.

If you read nothing else in this briefing, understand this: the most useful company reviews sit in the middle. Two and three stars tend to hold the actual signal because they’re specific, they show the trade-offs and they describe patterns rather than emotional extremes.

One-star reviews often reflect an outlier experience - someone who had a spectacularly bad time, often for reasons specific to their situation.

Five-star reviews can be equally unreliable, but for different reasons.

When you see a wall of five-star praise, especially when the language sounds polished, generic or oddly aligned, your curiosity should be immediately triggered.

Not because every positive review is fake but because professional reputation management exists and companies use it more than most people realise.

There are entire firms paid to manage online narratives. They monitor Glassdoor, Reddit, Whirlpool, industry forums and blog comment sections.

They run daily keyword alerts on company names and senior leaders. They respond to criticism, bury unfavourable content, counter negative narratives and smooth over anything that might damage the brand.

Some reviews are encouraged internally through employee engagement initiatives. Some are even incentivised. More are written by specialist agencies.

During a crisis - a discrimination lawsuit, a mass resignation, an executive scandal - this work accelerates. Content gets flagged for removal, videos disappear from social media and articles lose visibility in search results. With enough money and the right relationships, reputational cleanup moves very fast.

This is just public relations doing what public relations does best.

But it means that if you’re relying on public reviews alone to assess culture, leadership quality or psychological safety, you’re missing half the picture and possibly the more important half.

Culture is not made by the Marketing team

Culture is behaviour under pressure.

What you’re really trying to assess when you research a potential employer is how power operates within that organisation. How conflict is handled. Who thrives and who burns out. Who gets protected when something goes wrong and who gets blamed.

That information rarely lives in polished testimonials or carefully worded reviews that HR definitely saw before they went live.

This is why informal due diligence matters so much and why I tell people that quiet conversations contain more truth than any company website ever will.

Most people will talk if you ask respectfully, especially if you’re clear that you’re gathering context rather than collecting gossip.

Reach out to former employees through LinkedIn. Ask why they left. Ask what kind of person succeeds there. Ask what leadership actually rewards versus what they say they reward. Ask what gets you sidelined or frozen out.

If they hesitate before answering, notice that. If they lower their voice even though you’re messaging in text, notice that energy.

If they say “it really depends on who you work for” or “some teams are great and some are rough,” really notice that because it’s telling you that your experience will be determined by factors outside your control and largely invisible during the interview process.

If they don’t feel safe to talk about their experience at all, notice that too.

Managers shape your day-to-day life and the quality of your health more than most people realise. More than your GP, honestly. More than the brand, the perks or the impressive client list.

We always hear that “people rarely leave companies - they leave managers” and I believe that to the core because many people managers are not trained in actual leadership.

They’re not necessarily malicious or evil. They’re just unskilled.

They struggle with emotional regulation under stress. They were promoted for technical output rather than their people skills. They absorb pressure from above and transmit it downward because nobody taught them any other way to handle it.

Nice people can still cause harm when they lack skill.

Impact matters more than intent, which is an uncomfortable thing to sit with because we’re taught to give people credit for trying.

But if someone’s management style is making you anxious, slowly diminishing your confidence or even affecting your sleep, the fact that they’re a nice person who means well doesn’t actually change your lived experience.

This is why senior roles pay what they pay - it’s called the “danger money” or the “heart attack” money for a reason.

The pressure is real, the emotional spillover is real and the stakes for getting it wrong are high (or at least they should be).

Here’s the uncomfortable part for those of you early in your careers: your leverage is usually limited. You might not feel able to ask pointed questions in interviews about turnover rates or management training or how the organisation handles interpersonal conflict.

You might fear looking difficult or high-maintenance or like you’re not a team player. Sometimes that fear is rational because some interviewers will hold it against you, especially when there are dozens of others just like you waiting for a their shot.

So you make trade-offs instead.

You accept a role for the prestige, the money, the learning opportunity or because it’s a “two-year tour of duty” that gets you a logo on your CV that potentially opens other doors.

Those choices are not wrong. They’re strategic and sometimes necessary for the long game. I’ve made similar ones myself.

The mistake here is pretending that culture doesn’t matter while it quietly erodes you, telling yourself you can handle anything for two years when your nervous system is keeping the score.

This is where your gut feeling becomes data.

Pay attention to how interviews feel, not just what is said but how it is said.

Do people interrupt each other or talk over each other? Do leaders actually listen or are they performing listening while clearly waiting for their turn to talk?

Do they talk about former employees with respect or is there subtle blame and dismissiveness? Do they get defensive when you ask about feedback mechanisms or professional development support?

Red flags rarely announce themselves loudly. They whisper. Dismissive jokes that aren’t quite jokes. Vague answers about why the last person left.

Overemphasis on resilience and grit and thriving in “fast-paced environments” or being “like a family” which often translates to “we will burn you out and call it character building and loyalty”.

Notice what they don’t say as much as what they do. No single signal proves anything but patterns certainly do.

Three people all mentioning high turnover in casual conversation. Two references who are enthusiastic about the work but noticeably quiet about the leadership. An interviewer who talks about work-life balance but emails you at 10pm. Your body knows things your brain tries to rationalise away.

At some point you still have to make a choice

You weigh what you know against what you need and you take a calculated risk.

You step forward and if you land on a culture landmine, please remember that you’re not trapped there forever.

Probation periods exist for a reason and they protect you as much as they protect the employer. Leaving is allowed, even if it feels destabilising or like failure. It’s not failure to protect yourself from a situation that’s harming you. Keep that little ‘eff you’ emergency money fund topped up as much as you can so you have flexibility.

The goal here is not perfection or finding the mythical perfect workplace where nothing ever goes wrong.

The goal is informed consent. Eyes open, expectations calibrated and strong boundaries intact from day one. You know what you’re walking into and you’ve decided the tradeoff is worth it for specific reasons that make sense to you.

This is the work I wish I’d understood earlier in my career.

I learned it by stepping on every landmine myself, by staying too long in situations that damaged me, by meeting brilliant leaders and deeply unskilled ones and seeing the full spectrum of what’s possible out there without some sort of external standard or leadership licence.

Companies manage narratives because that’s what companies do but it is their people that live the reality. The gap between those two things is where harm happens, quietly and consistently, to people who were taught they were supposed to just tough it out because it’s “better the devil you know”.

If leaders and organisations refuse to do better, we share information instead. We compare notes. We protect each other as best we can. We make the invisible visible. That’s what a Career Big Sis does anyway - not because I have all the answers but because I’ve made enough mistakes to know which questions really matter.

If there are other parts of the corporate landscape that you want me to ungatekeep, DM me.

Nothing changes when everyone stays quiet and too many people are suffering in silence because they think it’s just them or that they’re “not cut out for this”.

Life is too short, your nervous system matters and your career is not a prison sentence.

Do your due diligence and choose with care.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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