Supervisors make or break an employee’s experience with a company. Great ones foster happy, loyal employees; the terrible ones have workers firing up their resumes.
Unfortunately, job seekers usually don’t know which manager they’ll get until they’re already employed. A new website wants to change that. Launched in December, Completed.com allows employees to rate their experience with direct supervisors. Other websites, such as Glassdoor.com, only have ratings for company CEOs and culture.
“Most people don’t work with, or even meet, their company’s CEO,” says Mike Zammuto, founder and CEO of Completed.com. “People quit managers, not companies. Your direct supervisor determines how happy or successful you are at your job.”
Tens of thousands of users created free profiles on Completed.com since its launch, according to Zammuto. He is waiting until the site garners 50 million users before investing in advertising or marketing, he said.
“We want to focus on creating great content and seeing how our users react to the experience,” Zammuto says.
Zammuto partnered with a marketing agency to gather supervisor profiles for Completed.com. Currently there are 25 million professionals listed on the site, but the number is expected to jump to 50 million by the end of the first quarter, Zammuto says. Professionals can claim their profile and add the information typically seen on a LinkedIn profile — photos, biography, education and work history. But the reviews are what separate his site from LinkedIn, he says.
“LinkedIn is great for networking and connecting with people, but all the reviews are done by people who like you,” Zammuto says. “We’re looking to provide a fuller picture of what it’s like to work with this person.”
On Completed.com, employees rate their supervisors out of five stars — five being a perfect score — and have the option to write a detailed description of what it’s like to work with this person. Users have the option of posting reviews anonymously. Multiple reviews of a single manager accumulate into an average score. The site also picks up on key words in reviews to help determine an individual’s strengths and weaknesses.
“We’re holding people and companies accountable. If people know their actions are being monitored, maybe they’ll behave better,” Zammuto says.
Colleen Kitchen, an Oregon-based musician, signed up on Completed.com to help promote her music sales. Kitchen said her page hasn’t received any engagement from other users, and she’s not sure the site is designed for her needs.
“I got really fired up and did some stuff, but nothing happened,” Kitchen says.
Kitchen didn’t realize Completed.com is meant for rating supervisors, she thought it was a social media site for connecting professionals — like LinkedIn. She said she could see value after learning the website’s true purpose.
“It would be totally awesome for job seekers to get some honest [feedback] on potential supervisors,” Kitchen says. “I’ve had some doozies in my day.”
While the site is helpful for potential employees deciding on a job offer, Zammuto says HR departments can use the same information to monitor workplace conditions within their company.
“Getting negative feedback can be uncomfortable, but I think we provide the tools to help facilitate constructive conversations,” Zammuto says.
With any review site, making sure contributions are legitimate is a concern. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed companies were telling employees to leave positive reviews on Glassdoor.com to boost their organization’s average score. Yelp users have the opposite problem with competitors leaving nasty reviews to lower the scores of other companies. Zammuto says he assembled a team of technical professionals skilled with website design and security to combat these problems on Completed.com.
“We use security technology to determine if someone is who they say they are, and we have actual people take a look at flagged profiles,” he says. “We don’t look at every review necessarily, but the site is aided by machine learning curve tools to figure out which ones need a second look.”
Companies and individuals can’t remove negative reviews from Completed.com, but there is a process for removing malicious reviews, Zammuto says.
After the website gains more users, Zammuto plans to structure it so supervisors can rate employee performance. The idea is to help keep employees honest, while connecting companies with reputable talent during the hiring process.
“We want this to be a site that holds people accountable and encourages them to be better,” Zammuto says.
Zammuto has certifications from Harvard’s business and law schools. Over the course of his career, he’s held various CEO and COO positions at computer and consulting companies. In addition to managing Completed.com, he’s the current CEO of Claims Verification Inc., an investigative firm serving the insurance industry, according to LinkedIn.
