Hohman hasn’t spent a lot of time sending his résumé to H.R. departments. He was hired to work at Microsoft as soon as he graduated from Stanford, where he studied computer science, and became part of Rich Barton’s circle of frequent collaborators, a genial group that reminded me of the all-male crew of actors who regularly work with the movie director Judd Apatow. Another member of the group, the investor Erik Blachford, who is on the boards of Zillow and Glassdoor, described Hohman as a “hard-core technical engineer” who is also “a fun guy.” At Microsoft, Hohman was known for being motivated, but also for having a mischievous streak. He once told the members of his engineering team that, if they hit their ship date, he would shave Barton’s head in front of the entire staff. (It happened.) In 1996, Barton hired Hohman to work for Expedia, where he spent two years running Hotwire, a hotel-booking Web site that the company had acquired. After leaving Expedia, he decided to stay home with his wife and two young kids in Mill Valley and play the online video game World of Warcraft, in which multiple players control character avatars and fulfill “quests” in “guilds.” When Barton came to Hohman with the printer anecdote, he knew that Hohman was ready to start a company of his own. Plus, Barton told me, “I kind of knew Robert was playing a lot of World of Warcraft.”

Hohman told me that, when he spoke to Barton, he had been playing the game for six months straight. Barton’s idea about making salary information transparent had struck him not merely as a good business concept but as an opportunity to mimic the guilds that the game’s characters form and join: “I was thinking that, if we built a platform that let people help each other, by sharing information, that could scale way more than we ever could by researching companies ourselves.” He said yes to Barton—who became an early investor in Glassdoor, and is now the non-executive chairman of its board—and teamed up with Tim Besse, another Microsoft-Expedia alum.

Vault, JobVent, and FuckedCompany already provided workers with places to gossip and rail, but such forums had a reputation as “rant sites for angry people,” Hohman said. In order to keep the conversation on Glassdoor “constructive,” he and his co-founders created a set of Community Guidelines, which included: no profanity or discriminatory language; no personal attacks; no sharing trade secrets; and no naming individuals who are below the level of the most senior executives, known as the “C-suite.”

Some early reviews posed other kinds of problems. “ ‘People are doing coke in the bathroom, and the C.E.O. is a drug addict,’ ” Hohman said. “That was a tough one. Is it relevant to a job seeker? Well, yes. But it’s also a criminal matter. The question is, are we the forum to resolve it?” After some discussion, Hohman and his colleagues decided that information about nonviolent crimes—drug use, sexual harassment, financial malfeasance—should be published, since it was relevant. When reviews contained threats of violence or descriptions of violent crime, like rape and murder, they would contact the authorities. (In April, 2013, after a user left a review of a hospital where he used to work which included a threat to bomb it, Glassdoor contacted the hospital, which called the police. The man was arrested.)

When it comes to sexual harassment, Glassdoor’s spokespeople noted that posting about it on the site should not replace reporting it through “appropriate channels.” But Hohman was enthusiastic about the site’s potential to curb abuse. Bringing up the #MeToo movement, he said, “This time that we’re going through, I do not think it’s an accident that it’s happening as transparency has been on the rise. If you wanted to run a racist, misogynistic company where there was sexual harassment going on, the only way you could possibly do that is to have there be this ironclad veil of secrecy. Which is basically what Harvey Weinstein had.”

In 2008, shortly before Glassdoor’s launch, Hohman called his sister, Melissa Fernandez, in Akron. She had just given birth to her first child and wanted to work from home. He enlisted her to read every review that was submitted to the site, scanning them for violations of the Community Guidelines. When the workload got to be too much, Fernandez recruited Cara Barry, another stay-at-home mom, who recruited a third mom, her neighbor. Eventually, this group—the content-moderation team—grew to include twenty-six people, several of them men, although for years employees at Glassdoor’s headquarters referred to them as “the WAHMs,” for “work-at-home moms.” During the past decade, Glassdoor has built machine-learning algorithms to screen for fraud and profanity, and the members of Fernandez’s team read anything that users have flagged; these days, they also read half of all reviews submitted to the site regardless—a step that Yelp and TripAdvisor don’t take, Hohman said.

Hohman had also attempted to deal with a common problem plaguing online reviews. In statistics, it’s known as “voluntary response bias”—the fact that volunteers are more likely to have extreme opinions. Hohman calls it the “J-shaped curve.” If you were to graph the number of stars that voluntary reviewers assign to things, you’d get a relatively large quantity of five-star reviews, from the people who love whatever they are writing about; a low number of fours, threes, or twos; and mostly ones, from the foaming-at-the-mouth furious.

From the start, Hohman instituted a “give to get” policy at Glassdoor. As a user, before you can look at any information on the site you must contribute an anonymous review of your own current job or one that you’ve held in the past five years, or share your salary. (Glassdoor users are allowed one review per year for each company they’ve worked at.) Hohman says that this gives everyday users greater incentive to contribute to the site, and he claims that it shows in Glassdoor’s data. “From the beginning, the average rating has been 3.2, which is not low,” he said. “And, if you looked at the distribution, it’s not bimodal. Seventy per cent of reviews are in the middle hump, where you are satisfied with your job but not ecstatic. Like, ‘Things are O.K. Work is fine.’ ”

Still, the one-star reviews make a strong impression. I learned more about the site from a friend, Alexa Hirschfeld, who, in 2008, founded Paperless Post, a New York tech startup that makes online invitations. Her company recently chose to end an entire business line, printed invitations, in order to put more resources into digital, and laid off fifteen per cent of the staff. “That was when I realized the crazy power of this thing,” she told me. Within days of the layoffs, the negative reviews started trickling in. “We went from a four-star average to a bunch of one-star reviews with very angry descriptions.” The company’s over-all score went down, and potential recruits started asking questions. She went on, “Basically, as a company, you have to make really hard decisions. And, if you make everybody happy, you’re not going to succeed.”

When I mentioned this to Hohman, he sighed. “People will say, ‘I fired that person! Why would you let them write a review?’ ” he said. “My answer is, that person is writing about their own experience, and their one data point is valid.” He also argued that turmoil and even layoffs do not necessarily result in bad reviews: “How you’re treated when you’re separating says a lot about companies. Caterpillar”—the construction-equipment company—“was one of the big ones. In 2009, they laid off twenty thousand people, and their ratings actually went up, they did such a good job communicating—the communication was just so crisp.”

Last fall, Dawn Lyon, Glassdoor’s chief reputation officer (and now a consultant), told me that bosses often feel wronged by Glassdoor: “People say, ‘I have a Glassdoor problem.’ We deal with that all the time. The question is, do you really have a Glassdoor problem, or is it a reflection of something going on inside the company?” Some people suspect that Glassdoor might make certain allowances to paying clients, but Hohman adamantly denied this. “No special treatment for clients versus non-clients,” he said. “With new sales hires, the first value I lead with is integrity. Everyone needs to know the day they start we’ll never trade a review for money. Because once we do that we’ve lost all credibility as a neutral platform.”