How Seen grades companies

The letter

The score maps to one letter, the same on the company page, share cards and every list:

• A+97 to 100
• A93 to 96
• A-90 to 92
• B+87 to 89
• B83 to 86
• B-80 to 82
• C+77 to 79
• C73 to 76
• C-70 to 72
• D+67 to 69
• D63 to 66
• D-60 to 62
• Funder 60

Next to the grade, a short line says what the reports add up to: at 75% or more hearing back it reads “Most applicants hear back”, from 50% it reads that about half hear back, and below that, that most never hear back.

What counts as a report

A report is one applicant’s account of one application and how it ended:

• Heard back. Any answer from the company: a screen, an assessment, an interview, an offer, a hire, or a rejection. A rejection is still an answer.
• Ghosted. The applicant never heard anything back.
• Automated rejection. Counts as a finished application, but neither as a human answer nor as ghosting.

Applications that are still open, or that the applicant withdrew, are not counted: they say nothing yet about whether the company answers. Employee reviews (what it is like to work somewhere) are shown on the page but are never counted as hiring outcomes.

The response rate is the share of finished applications that heard back; the ghost rate is the share that never did. Both are weighted by where each report came from (below).

Where reports come from, and how much each counts

A report sent to Seen by an applicant counts fully. Accounts gathered from public sources count less, because nobody at Seen can ask the writer a follow up question.

• Reports from Seen userscounts 1

  Sent with the report form or the application tracker. Naming the job board you applied on (LinkedIn, Indeed…) does not change the weight.

• Seen applicant surveyscounts 1

  Answers applicants give in Seen’s own short surveys.

• Imported hiring accountscounts 0.55

  First hand hiring accounts imported from job review sites.

• Redditcounts 0.3

  Shown as public discussion, never as a Seen user’s report.

• Public review sitescounts 0.3

  First hand accounts found on public review sites and forums, labelled with the site they came from.

• Online mentionscounts 0.5

  Quoted accounts of what people say online. Only ones that state an outcome move the rates.

When a company gets a grade

A grade needs at least 1 real applicant account and 5 in total, where each report counts 1 and each online mention counts half. Mentions alone never grade a company. Below that bar the page shows no letter, no score and no rates, only what Seen holds so far, as “Not graded yet (2 of 5 applicant accounts)”.

Response and ghost percentages need 5 applicant accounts of their own. A company graded with fewer shows its grade and says there are too few reports for a rate yet.

The math

The score starts at 50 and moves with what the reports say:

• plus up to 40 for the response rate (40 × the rate);
• minus up to 30 for the ghost rate (30 × the rate);
• minus up to 15 for a long average wait (15 × days waited ÷ 60, counted up to 60 days);
• plus up to 10 for how much evidence there is (5 × the natural log of the weighted report count plus 1), so a large sample nudges the score but can never outweigh the outcomes.

Three small, capped adjustments can follow:

• Time people stay. Up to 8 points either way from how long people stay at the company, read from résumés. Only with at least 4 résumés; full strength at 10.
• Employee review grades. Up to 5 points either way from the letter grades in employee reviews, where an average C changes nothing. Only with at least 5 reviews; full strength at 30.
• Dead listings. Minus 4 for each job listing that applicants reported and Seen confirmed was no longer open, up to minus 20.

A few reports should not make a company look perfect or terrible. So until a company has enough evidence, its rates lean toward a typical company on Seen (70% hear back, 30% never do): the typical company counts as 2 weighted reports, so two public posts barely move a score, two reports from Seen users move it half-way, and thirty Seen reports are almost entirely the company’s own.

The result is kept between 0 and 100. Some older scores started from a research estimate made before any reports existed; reports are blended with it instead, count equally with it at 8 weighted reports, and outweigh it beyond that.

A company’s score is recomputed whenever a new report about it is saved, and the page shows the date of the last recompute.

Reports are claims

Seen does not check each account with the company, so every number is worded as what applicant accounts say, never as a fact about the employer. To keep one person from moving a grade, a report is held for review and does not count until someone at Seen approves it when it is sent without signing in, when the same person already reported the same company in the last 30 days, or when one account sends 15 or more in a day. Reports an admin rejects, and second copies of a report Seen already holds, are kept on record but never counted.

Money never changes a score

Employers can pay for a featured listing or a Transparency Verified badge. Both change where a company appears or what badge it shows. Neither one is an input to the grade, and no one can pay to raise or remove one.

If you are the employer

You can claim your company’s page from the employer portal and reply to reports about it. Replies are reviewed before they appear, are labelled as the employer’s, and never change the score. If a report is inaccurate, contains personal information or looks made up, send it to us through the contact page with what supports your case; disputes are reviewed under the content policy. A negative experience on its own is never removed.