In July 2026, only 43% of U.S. employees told Glassdoor they expected their employer’s business to improve over the next six months. Axios reported on August 3, 2026, that this was the lowest reading in Glassdoor’s data going back to 2016, down from a peak of 53% in 2022.
That single figure explains why Glassdoor statistics matter more to employers this year than at any point since the pandemic. Your current staff are less confident, they are writing about it in public, and your next hire is reading every word before deciding whether to take your call. Below are the numbers that matter, each with its publisher and year, followed by a working model for what to do with them.
Who Reads Glassdoor Reviews Before They Apply?
Picture the candidate on a park bench between interviews, laptop open, scrolling your reviews page. Glassdoor’s own research has tracked that behavior for a decade, though some of its best-known candidate figures are older than many employers realize.
Glassdoor’s employer blog cites a 2016 Glassdoor U.S. site survey in which 62% of job seekers said their perception of a company improved after seeing the employer respond to reviews. The same page cites survey work from 2016 and 2017 finding that 80% of job seekers worldwide read at least four online reviews before forming an opinion of a company. A Glassdoor blog post updated in July 2026 repeats a figure from Glassdoor’s candidate experience guide that 70% of users are more likely to apply when an employer manages its Glassdoor presence, though that post gives no survey year.
Newer data shows what candidates do after reading. Glassdoor Economic Research’s June 2026 midyear check-in found the offer decline rate was 21.4% for interviews that began between January 1 and April 15, 2026, down 5.1 percentage points from the same window in 2025. Candidates are saying yes more often in a weaker market. That cuts both ways for employers: you may close hires faster now, but people who accept out of caution and then find the reviews were accurate tend to become your next batch of reviewers.
The takeaway is simple. Candidates read, they compare, and they notice whether you answered.
Glassdoor Company Statistics: Ownership, Size, and the Indeed Merger
Glassdoor was founded in June 2007 by Robert Hohman, Rich Barton, and Tim Besse, according to Wikipedia’s company history. Its company ratings site launched in 2008. By 2015, Glassdoor reported 30 million users across 190 countries.
Recruit Holdings, the Japanese parent of Indeed, announced a $1.2 billion cash deal to buy Glassdoor in May 2018, as GeekWire reported at the time. For years Glassdoor ran as an independent subsidiary. In 2021 it bought Fishbowl, a professional chat app built around verified identities.
The workforce has shrunk in waves. Glassdoor laid off about 300 people, around 30% of staff, in May 2020, and about 140 people, around 15%, in March 2023. In February 2024 it announced it was closing its last offices in Chicago and San Francisco and moving to remote-only work.
The biggest structural change came in 2025. On July 10, 2025, Reuters reported on a Recruit Holdings memo announcing about 1,300 job cuts across Indeed and Glassdoor, about 6% of its HR technology segment, and a plan to fold Glassdoor’s operations into Indeed, as summarized by Allwork.Space. Recruit CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba wrote that “AI is changing the world, and we must adapt.” Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong left effective October 1, 2025. GeekWire clarified that Glassdoor’s brand and platform would remain intact. By January 2026, Glassdoor’s press releases described it as “part of Indeed,” and Owen Humphries was speaking for the company as President.
For employers, the practical upshot is that your Glassdoor profile and your Indeed presence now sit under one operator. Expect the two to keep converging.
Leadership and Manager Ratings Hit a Decade Low
If one category of Glassdoor statistics deserves a standing slot in your leadership meetings, this is it.
Glassdoor Economic Research reported in June 2026 that the average senior leadership rating in Glassdoor reviews fell below 3.5 in April 2026, the lowest month since 2017. The drop was sharpest in management and consulting, media and communication, and technology. Comparing 2026 year-to-date with 2025, mentions of “misalignment” in reviews about leadership rose 95%, “disconnect” rose 52%, and “distrust” rose 18%. That analysis drew on 3.3 million reviews from January 2019 through May 20, 2026.
When Glassdoor announced its 2026 Best-Led Companies on August 12, 2026, with NVIDIA at number one, Chief Economist Daniel Zhao put it this way: “Trust in leadership is fraying at exactly the moment employees need it most.” NVIDIA also topped the 2025 Best-Led list, announced in September 2025.
The manager layer matters as much as the C-suite. Senior economist Chris Martin of Glassdoor Economic Research published an analysis on October 1, 2025, covering January 2022 to July 2025. Individual contributors rated their employer 3.91 on average when both leaders and managers were rated as satisfactory, and 3.28 when both were not. When leaders were satisfied but managers were not, the figure was 3.43. When managers were satisfied but leaders were not, it held at 3.82. About 12% of companies showed this kind of mismatch, and in restaurants and food service, 21% of companies had satisfied leaders above dissatisfied managers.
Read that gap twice. Good frontline managers protect your rating even when employees sour on leadership. Weak managers drag it down even when the executives are well liked.
The Employee Confidence Index, Month by Month
Glassdoor’s Employee Confidence Index measures the share of U.S. full-time and part-time employees who rate their employer’s six-month business outlook as positive. Glassdoor collects tens of thousands of these ratings each month and reweights them to match the national mix of industries.
The 2025 and 2026 readings tell a steady story of decline. Fortune reported that about 44% of workers held a positive outlook in May 2025, a record low at the time. Zhao’s December 2025 update put the figure at 46.5%, just below 46.9% a year earlier, and noted that June 2025 had set another record low. October 2025 came in at 45.7%, according to Research Live, down from 51.9% a year before. In 2026, May set a new low of 43.7%, June ticked up to 44%, and July fell to 43%, per Axios.
Seniority shapes the numbers. In October 2025, senior-level employees sat at 58.3% positive while entry-level staff were at 46.4%. Axios reported the same split in July 2026, with entry-level and mid-career workers more pessimistic and senior staff improving.
Industry matters too. Axios reported that over the year to July 2026, confidence fell almost 14 points in telecommunications, the steepest drop of any sector, along with 12 points in hotels and travel accommodation and 9 points in restaurants and food service. Insurance, technology, and aerospace and defense also declined, and Glassdoor tied the insurance slide to cost-cutting and AI automation of claims processing. Back in October 2025, Research Live reported that aerospace and defense had already fallen 7.9 points year over year to 49.8%.
If your executives feel fine and your junior staff do not, Glassdoor’s data says you are typical. Your reviews will reflect the junior view, because that is where most of your headcount sits.
What Employees Are Writing About in 2026
Keyword trends in reviews tell you what your own page will soon say. Glassdoor’s June 2026 midyear check-in, drawing on 6.4 million U.S. reviews, found that reviews mentioning AI-related keywords rose 240% year over year as of May 2026. Sentiment flipped: AI mentions were 55% positive and 41% negative in 2025, then 53% negative and 43% positive in 2026. Mentions of burnout rose 43% and inflation-related concerns rose 34% over the same period.
Job security is the other big theme. May 2026 review mentions of job insecurity rose 63% year over year, and explicit layoff mentions rose 29%. Glassdoor also found that layoffs of fewer than 50 people grew from 38% of layoffs in 2015 to 51% in 2025, which fits its “forever layoff” label for a pattern of small, repeated cuts.
On December 10, 2025, Glassdoor named “fatigue” its word of the year, as CBS News reported, after mentions rose 41% from the prior year on its community forums. Mentions of “agentic” rose more than 2,200%. In a spring 2025 community poll cited in the same report, 78% of professionals said events in the news were draining their energy at work.
Work arrangements show up in the ratings as well. The midyear check-in found that in 2026, remote workers rated work-life balance at 3.97 and hybrid workers at 4.10, against 4.03 for everyone else. Career opportunity told a different story: remote workers rated it 3.16, hybrid workers 3.35, and on-site workers 3.67. Glassdoor also counted 11.1% of workers in remote-only jobs in May 2026, down from 12.5% a year earlier. If you are pulling people back to the office, expect your balance scores to wobble and your career scores to hold.
Early-career pay is the last theme worth watching. Glassdoor estimated that early-career real earnings in 2026 were 0.7% below 2020 levels, after recovering to 2020 levels in 2025, with inflation at 3.8% in April 2026. Junior staff are the most pessimistic group in the confidence data and the group whose pay is slipping. Their reviews will say so.
Best Places to Work 2026, by the Numbers
Glassdoor’s 18th annual Employees’ Choice Awards, released January 21, 2026, put Crew Carwash at number one with a 4.6 rating. In-N-Out Burger, NVIDIA, Ryan, and Keller Williams followed at 4.5. Mars, ServiceNow, Bain and Company, Houston Methodist, and EPAM Systems rounded out the top 10 at 4.4.
The geography shifted. The San Francisco Bay Area had 13 winners, down from 23 in 2025, while New York City had 10. Manufacturing and retail gained ground, while technology, healthcare, and biotech lost winners year over year. Rankings drew on reviews from U.S.-based employees submitted between October 17, 2024, and October 16, 2025, and large companies needed at least 75 ratings in each category.
The lesson for everyone else: the best-rated employers are not all glamorous brands. A car wash chain beat every tech giant.
The Anonymity Question
Glassdoor’s value rests on employees believing they can speak without fear. In March 2024, that belief took a hit. Ars Technica reported that after Glassdoor integrated Fishbowl, which requires identity verification, users were being signed up for Fishbowl accounts and some found their real names added to their profiles. Engadget, summarizing the Ars report on March 20, 2024, described a user named Monica who said she never consented and was told her name could not revert to initials. A Glassdoor spokesperson told Ars that users could remain anonymous. EFF lawyer Aaron Mackey told Ars the change “raises some potential concerns about data privacy and anonymity.”
Courts have also tested the boundary. In 2017, a U.S. appeals court required Glassdoor to disclose reviewer identities to federal prosecutors investigating employer misconduct. In 2022, Glassdoor lost a case brought by the New Zealand company Zuru and had to unmask anonymous reviewers. If you are weighing legal action over a review, start with our guide on how to deal with defamation online, because the reputational cost of suing reviewers often exceeds the review itself.
The 4R Response Model for Employers
Statistics only help if they change what you do. We use a four-step routine with clients, the 4R Response Model: Read, Root-cause, Reply, Report back.
Read your numbers against a benchmark, not against your hopes. Compare your overall rating, CEO approval, and senior leadership score to your industry and to the national figures above. A 3.6 leadership score looks weak in isolation and strong next to a national average that dipped below 3.5 in April 2026.
Root-cause the themes, not the individual reviews. Tag your last 12 months of reviews by topic (managers, pay, layoffs, AI, workload) and count them. If “misalignment” and “communication” keep appearing, Glassdoor’s own data says you are part of a national trend, and the fix is internal, not cosmetic.
Reply in public, in plain language, within days. Thank the reviewer, name the specific issue, state what is changing, and skip the legal boilerplate. The 2016 Glassdoor survey finding that 62% of job seekers think better of employers who respond is old, but the behavior it describes has not reversed.
Report back by closing the loop on your page and inside the company. When you fix something reviewers raised, say so in your employer profile and your hiring materials. Over time, new reviews mention the change, and that is the only reliable way to move a rating. Our employer branding guide covers how to turn those fixes into recruiting content.
Run the 4R cycle every quarter. It takes a few hours and turns Glassdoor from a source of dread into an early-warning system.
Reading Glassdoor Statistics Without Fooling Yourself
A few cautions before you quote any of these numbers in a board deck. Glassdoor’s reviews are voluntary, so they skew toward people with strong feelings. The Employee Confidence Index is reweighted to represent U.S. industries, but it still reflects people who chose to rate their employer. Several popular candidate figures date to 2016 and 2017. And because Glassdoor now operates inside Indeed, methods and product features may keep changing.
None of that makes the data useless. It means you should watch your own trend line, compare it to Glassdoor’s published benchmarks, and treat any single month as noise.
Consider Crew Carwash. A regional car wash chain topped Glassdoor’s 2026 Best Places to Work list with a 4.6, ahead of NVIDIA, Bain, and ServiceNow, during a year when national employee confidence was sliding toward record lows. It did not get there with better PR. It got there because enough of its own employees, over a full year of reviews, chose to say something good in public. That is the standard every employer reading these Glassdoor statistics is measured against.