Peers & Bosses (PeBO) Rating Platform…Next-Gen Recommendation and Rating

Source of image: leer.tips

With all the wide range of social media platforms, there is no comprehensive or well-designed platform for rating and evaluating peers and bosses in a transparent, fair, and anonymous mechanism.

Although LinkedIn has an option to recommend or review others, the way it is implemented on LinkedIn has a lot of bias and may not be accurate sometimes. As users decide who to recommend them, and if anyone recommends someone without a request, the user has the full authority to decide whether to post that or not. No one will ask another one to recommend them unless they are 100% sure the review will be in their favor.

(www.complete.com), has an anonymous review, but it only enables typing and picking a star. There is no underlying mechanism or structure.

On the other hand, organizations that do peer review, have the results saved confidentially with the HR or the department under which the employee works.

So, if anyone applies for a job, all the future peers or supervisors are like “Black boxes”. It is everyone’s right to know about future peers and supervisors to make the right career move. Negative emotions at work have an impact on productivity, employee engagement, and work performance[1].

Accordingly having a platform that enables people to rate their peers or bosses publicly and freely without declaring their identity, can help organizations to make the right decision in terms of contract renewal. Furthermore, it may reduce the attrition rate, as applicants will have access to useful information before accepting an offer and become emotionally or mentally drained in a negative workplace. According to Glassdoor, the average cost of hiring in the year 2018 was $4 k.[2]

There is a platform that serves the people working in academia(Rate my Professor), but it focuses on one dimension which is teaching, it does not seem to be built on a mechanism, rather than qualitative input from students.

PeBo’s main idea is rating professionals anonymously, in addition to, the following functionality:

• Dynamic KPIs upon which the rating is done, that varies based on industry and title.
• Open-ended review or recommendation letter, which can always be checked by any employer instead of asking the applicants for letters every time they change a job.
• Summary for top words (Positive /Negative) extracted from the posts, to be placed on the top of the account as shown in Figure 1.
• Overall Rating, and a breakdown for certain skills(i.e. Support, feedback, leader, Time management, organized, harsh, rude, anxious, qualified…etc).
• Collect useful information or link to other related platforms instead of reinventing the wheel.

Regarding Affordance, (in terms of self and others)

PeBo enables:

• The account owner to control or change their profile image, link account to other accounts (i.e. LinkedIn, research gate…etc)
• Adding content to the gallery
• Reporting any review or content included in the gallery that is inappropriate.
• Adding or removing referees.
• Any user with an account to interact and share reviews or content on any profile.
• Anonymous review, but any user may choose to show their identity, by adding themselves under “Referee List” as reflected in Figure 1.
• Audience with no account to check the content with no restriction. The content on the platform will be open to the public. So, the content can be viewed by anyone without having an account, but interactions mandates having an account.

PeBo does not enable:

• Users to have multiple identities or change their identities over time, but additional e-mail may be added.
• The account owner to control most of the content or reviews posted, but some checks will be added to detect and filter “fake” or “inappropriate” reviews.
• Deleting any content posted by the account owner or audience as long as it does not have any inappropriate, safety, or ethical concerns.

Finally, that platform is different from Linkedin or Glassdoor, as it adds a different dimension that is not included in both. Glassdoor is a platform for rating organizations as a whole, while LinkedIn helps people decide and define how they want to be perceived. While Pebo will reflect how employees are actually perceived by others. In the long run, PeBo may help develop and improve the rigid job recommendation system for good!

Figure 1: Design version 1.0 for PeBo ‘s Users Account Page

References:

[1] Pearson, C. M. (2017). The smart way to respond to negative emotions at work. MIT Sloan Management Review, 58(3), 49.

[2]https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/employee-feedback-engagement-tools