Review your employers using Criticat (Overview)
Now you can get the first hand information about employers. This is an initiative lead by Shweta Gupta. This definitely fills the gap of lack of information (read as inside information) of a company. The site target both potential employees (job search) as well as employers (reputation management). According to Alexa, their ranking in India is 2,734. 79% of the traffic is from India.
Criticat gives user opportunity to share the experience from an employer. Every employer gets a scoring based on user rating. And the score is based on work culture, salary benefits, job security, career growth, managers and how much you recommend. An user can rate each category from -5 to 5 . And the score is based 100 point scale. The users can give feedback anonymously. And the employers can have a look at these discussions and fix the issue if required. Most companies provide a platform to share their views. But obviously, employees would not find it comfortable to use such platforms to the fullest extend. And thats where Criticat finding its niche.
This is a site which is based on user generated content (UGC) and is rightly reflected in their tag line (You can set things right). The GUI is attractive and easy to use. Here is a block digram of overall Criticat system.
Based on the diagram above, users create the content in the form of ratings, job opening, polls advice, questions and discussion. And Criticat runs ads on their pages. Right now they have only google ads. Once they have sufficient user base, they are most likely to go for featured job ads.
According to their privacy policy, a user should not submit sensitive information including financial information. And they also say that they do not have a mechanism to pre-screen the data. However, they give an option to flag inappropriate content. But there is no information if they will take the content off someone has flagged the content. If there is a sensitive information, who will be sued, the user (who gives a nick name and a email id) or the company? The copyright violation issue between Youtube and Viacom gives good lesson. Salary information is considered to be sensitive and some employers prohibits discussion of the same, except with the HR.
There can be a separate section for employers to respond to the critics. A list of top employers by salary or rankings will also be good. Currently the search is by company name. A general search option will allow users mine the data based on certain keyword.
In the next post I will compare Criticat with some of the standard business models and some thoughts on if they have traction.
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Email from Shweta-
Thanks for reviewing Criticat on your blog . I really appreciate it. I liked the points you raised in the review specially copyright violation and all . We update our disclaimer from time to time to avoid getting into any kind of controversy. I thought its obvious how flagging content works but looks like that should go in the faq section.
About company search, our general search lets uers search for company by name. Advanced search lets user search for company by location and industry. We will be adding more stuff to our advanced search.
We are working on many more new features and one of them will be top employers on the basis of salary , work culture, job security and others.
I really appreciate your feedback and suggestions.
Warm Regards,
Shweta Gupta
Founder, Criticat.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/shwetagupta
http://www.shwetagupta.com/blog/about