Share your employer reviews on Criticat
Criticat is a new website, where users can rate and review their employer and share their workplace experiences. Users can also answer questions from prospective employees and create polls for any related topic. If you search for a company and it isnt already present on the site, you have the option to add the company details. Each user can provide only one review for a company and have the ability to revisit and edit their earlier review, if needed.
One of the features, which can facilitate spamming, is that a user can review multiple (of course, a person might have had several prior employers), unlimited employers. As per Shweta, the founder, if this feature is abused, they might consider restricting the number of companies a user can review.
They have an upcoming feature, enabling HR folks to post job openings on the site itself. As per Shweta, this will help them to close the loop between employee, prospective employee and the employer. Current monetization plans involve ads, however they also plan to introduce customized versions for internal use within companies.
So, will this model work ?
Honestly - I think it can go either ways. There are reviews like this and this, which provide no intrinsic value - either to another user or to the site itself. On the other hand, there are lots of useful reviews like this and this.
That aside, I think the site has been very well designed and implemented. They have made pretty good use of AJAX and bar charts. From a usability perspective, it is pretty intuitive and user friendly.
Give it a spin and let me know your thoughts.
February 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
yup….criticat is a nice and very innovative venture but it’s success is so unpredictable…an absolutely off the way concept…
btw,i guess this Shweta is Shweta Gupta,an ex-yahoo! employee as i had come across her website and also subscribed to her blog,Life Is Beautiful!!that was really good…
great work….
February 29th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Suresh,
yes its the same shweta — and yes..her blog is pretty interesting. I’d encourage everyone to give it a peek.
February 29th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Yeah right, shweta is pretty opitmistic about criticat. The concept can kick off as India has a huge IT population now and i think the real reason would be positive side, if criticat brings in that i am sure it will be a hit. Crib works only in bad times. It can turn out be helpful if companies get on board somehow.
The UI is really clean now and consistent too.
Best
March 4th, 2008 at 2:27 am
think its a great concept. Its very much needed in today’s job world. Site has been implemented very neatly. It might take a while and I guess it will take o
ff. I liked the “Advice the employer” feature which will encourage employees to
come up with something contructive
March 12th, 2008 at 9:55 am
I run an exactly similar venture like this called http://www.goolti.com which, instead of general companies, only targets companies that hire on H1B visas in the US. The site is doing pretty well.
July 30th, 2008 at 1:45 am
I think this idea has origin to a good site called coderific.com