Unvarnished lowers the bar on reviewing your colleagues

Along the way to creating Silicon Valley’s definitive people reviews site, Unvarnished cofounder Peter Kazanjy ran into a problem: Some people struggle to find words to describe their work partners. “Writing is hard,” he explained.  So the site, currently in an invitation-only beta, is solving the problem by giving users the option to rate people on a five-star scale instead.

Users anonymously rate and comment on people they work with, populating reviewers’ lists with connections from LinkedIn and Facebook. It then ranks those reviews based on verifiable links between reviewer and reviewee. Identities are “protected,” as Kazanjy puts it, so people can’t identify the author of a specific review, which in theory frees people up to say what they honestly think about a colleague’s performance.

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People always ask us, ‘How do you get people to submit reviews for coworkers about whom they don’t have very strong opinions?'” said Kazanjy.

At launch, Unvarnished allowed users to leave just star ratings of colleagues, optionally ranking them on skill, relationships, productivity, and integrity, and writing descriptions of their experiences. But the new star-only interface will encourage ratings of those more cursory connections, Kazanjy hopes.

So far, the site has defied predictions that it would become enmeshed in lawsuits by people seeking to dispute information left in reviews. In part because the site has stayed in an invitation-only beta, and in part because of the site’s clever algorithmic ranking of reviews to favor reviewers with real connections to the people they review, it hasn’t received so much as a subpoena, let alone a lawsuit.

“Right now we’re happy with the invite-only approach,” said Kazanjy. “It’s working well in conjunction with the checks and balances the site has built in to ensure that the content that comes onto the site is productive and professional. We’re very happy with the quality of the content on the site.”

Here’s a video demonstration of the new quick-ratings feature:

[Photo via FWS]