Ex-employer asks employee to write a positive review for them on a third-party platform—employee leaves them a scathing 1-star review and gets their fake positive reviews removed: 'I reported the 3 new 4.5-star reviews for manipulation'

Really, the only thing they need to be careful of is that the way they end the relationship will say a lot to their remaining employees about how they are likely to be treated in the same situation and could possibly cause some ongoing staffing problems. The brain drain and turnover from disillusioned staff can quickly reach a point where so much has been lost that there's no institutional knowledge of consequence. Only then will the alarm bells go off as market share begins to slough off and slide like a clifftop that has eroded far inward from the clifftop above. From there it's all in free fall, and there's no really putting it back to the way it was. 

There is, however, one avenue of recourse for employees: third-party anonymous reviews. These are, of course, as anonymous as anything else you're likely to encounter in the workplace. It doesn't matter that they don't control the platforms, there are other ways of figuring out who wrote a review. Even then, who actually wrote the review doesn't really matter. Once the guess has been made, the ex-employer will have made up their mind about who did it regardless of what the reality is. 

This presents a tricky situation for employees leaving and wanting to leave on good terms. When asked to make a review, what do you say? A lot of us probably wouldn't feel good about posting a dishonest review that might mislead future prospective employees. More selfishly, a lot of us are probably not jumping at the chance to do something to help an employer, let alone anyone, who didn't treat us very well.

But, if you don't write a review, that might give them some assumptions. And, worse, they might think that you wrote that scathing review that got posted on a platform right around the time that you left, even if you didn't.

That's what was happening in this thread when, after leaving a stressful job at a small planning and design firm, an employee received an unexpected message from his former boss asking him to leave a positive review on a job review website. The boss apparently believed the departure had been amicable, despite years of poor management and unrealistic workloads that coupled nicely with low pay and persistent staff turnover.

This irked the employee, and when he checked the company's profile, he noticed several suspicious reviews that had likely been written by management in an attempt to boost their review score on the platform. Instead of ignoring the request for a written review and walking away, he complied with the request and wrote a detailed, factual review carefully detailing his own actual experience working there. He also reported the suspicious reviews for manipulation, which got them removed, lowering the overall rating.