According to a recent article posted by ABC News, Honestly.com is a new website that allows users to connect and sign up via Facebook to rate their co-workers. The article explains that the website was “Originally launched in March as Unvarnished.com” and is now “not only changing its name, but opening itself up to a broader online community.” As the article reveals, “When it debuted earlier this year, some tech blogs were merciless with their criticism, calling it everything from a “clean, well-lighted place for defamation” to a “public bathroom wall for everyone on the planet” to “a completely evil social network.” But according to Honestly.com’s “About” section, the website defines itself as “an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews.”
While that doesn’t sound too bad at first glance, continuing on to the second sentence makes me think twice. Again, from the “About” section, “Honestly.com reviews help you get the inside scoop on other business professionals, providing candid assessments of coworkers, potential hires, business partners, and more.” The idea of getting “the inside scoop” on potential employees starts to sound a little unprofessional, potentially harmful and downright unnecessary. The use of the phrase “getting the inside scoop” makes it sound like employers and co-workers are purposely looking for dirt. While Linkedin.com has a similar feature, the “Recommendations” section on Linkedin seems relatively harmless as these are comments that individuals request from people they know, while Honestly.com welcomes anyone to comment anonymously on your skill level, relationships, productivity and integrity by “obscuring identity of review authors” as long as your have an account. According to the website, “This lets reviewers share their true, nuanced opinions without fear of repercussions.”
But this opens up a series of serious questions:
To start, how can you protect yourself from what could be essentially considered as online libel? If the Honestly.com website established a need to “let reviewers share their true, nuanced opinions without fear of repercussions,” then they must have acknowledged the fact that anyone can sign up, log on and defame other users online. There is a need for anonymity only because users can log on with the intent to harm others.
If you sign up and rate someone positively (and they later lose their good reputation), or, alternatively, if you rate someone poorly, will it reflect badly on you? Can these ratings come back to haunt you?
If someone is writing things that are not true, what are the consequences? What rights do you have as a user, if any? How can you prevent office politics from seeping into a rating system? For example, if you previously had a co-worker that just didn’t get along with you, how can you be sure they will be honest and unbiased about your work performance?
Will potential employers use this as a tool regardless of its wavering credibility?
What about companies and organizations that only give out professional, and not personal references, typically from the Human Resources Department? Those who only tell the dates worked and the title? How does Honestly.com not automatically break that gentleman’s code?
Unsurprisingly, a few people have already commented on the article and voiced their opinions on the site. When searching for reviews on Honestly.com, some seem to believe that it has as much credibility as Wikipedia. Sure, there could be several people signing on to rate you well and justly, but all it takes is one or two people to smear your profile and permanently damage your professional reputation. As if it’s not enough knowing that people can and do go after your professional reputation in the office, now you might have to worry about them logging on and doing it online.
The ABC News article establishes that the site’s founder Peter Kazanjy assures users that “his site employs several safeguards that have already proven effective in keeping nasty comments to a minimum.” This is allegedly supposed to protect individuals from having their names drug through the mud, but still, with a star rating of one to five this can hurt reputations without the additional inappropriate remarks. Also, theses safeguards are there to monitor and to keep remarks at a “minimum,” but will still be posted.
The article concludes, “‘At the end of the day, we think that people are good,’ he said. ‘We have seen [that] if you give them a platform where they can share their professional opinion, but they know there are incentives for good behavior and disincentives for bad behavior, then they don’t engage in bad behavior and they engage in good behavior. And I think we anticipate seeing that pattern continue.’”
What do you think as a hiring manager? As a job seeker? As a professional? Is this the new version of a Burn Book in the workplace or a useful tool for companies and organizations?
Have to agree with Kate’s concerns and state that (at least for me) the troubling downsides and lack of accountability on sites like honestly.com outweigh the benefits. While there are certainly times when anonymity is important (i.e., in whistle-blowing cases or when something unethical and illegal is being done at a company), that really isn’t the case on sites like these, and I think the credibility question on these sites would make me read any comments with a grain of salt. What are the consequences in a scenario when a disgruntled or low-performing employee decides to criticize his/her co-workers or bosses? To me, any negative review raises as many questions about the person doing the criticizing as much as the person being criticized. As a foodie, I actually have the same problem with sites like yelp: Who exactly is giving the opinions I’m reading?
I can’t see how Honestly.com will make it–and it’s a good thing, too. We don’t need other ways to defame one another anonymously on the web. Plus, since the site deals with people, not businesses, it likely falls within the ambit of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. (I didn’t come up with this idea, so I want to give credit where it’s due: http://fcralawyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/honestlycom-new-cra.html)