How to remove a Glassdoor review
Employee reviews are protected more than most, and the grounds that work are narrow and specific.
Flag the review to Glassdoor citing a Community Guidelines breach, most commonly that it identifies an individual by name, contains confidential business information, or is not from a genuine current or former employee. Glassdoor protects anonymity strongly and will not remove a review for being critical of management or culture.
The grounds that succeed
Glassdoor's guidelines are more protective of the reviewer than most platforms, on the reasoning that employee speech about employers has a public interest dimension. That narrows what you can act on, but does not eliminate it.
- Naming a non-executive individual. Reviews that identify a specific employee by name, rather than a role, frequently breach guidelines.
- Confidential or proprietary information, including unreleased financials or client names.
- Discriminatory language, threats or harassment.
- Content from someone who was never employed there, including competitors.
- Duplicate submissions from the same person.
What you cannot remove
Criticism of leadership, pay, culture, hours or management style is precisely what the platform exists to host. A review saying the CEO is a poor leader and the company burns people out is not removable, however damaging.
Attempting to remove that class of review by pressure or legal threat has repeatedly backfired publicly, turning a single review into a news story. If a named executive is the target, the more productive path is usually the wider one in Glassdoor reviews naming the CEO.
A review about your management is not a policy violation. It is the product.
Never ask staff to bury it
Organised campaigns asking employees to post positive reviews are detectable, are against the guidelines, and when discovered become a far worse story than the original review.
If the underlying issue is real, the durable fix is the issue. If it is not real, the narrow guideline grounds above are the route.
Common questions
Can Glassdoor reveal who wrote a review?
Glassdoor defends reviewer anonymity and has litigated to protect it. Identification generally requires legal process and is not routinely granted.
Do responses help?
A measured official response is often worth writing, because candidates read it as a signal of how the company handles criticism.
Can we remove reviews from former employees who left badly?
Not on those grounds alone. Being a disgruntled former employee does not itself breach the guidelines.
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Working through this for a business? See Reputation management for restaurants.