Unvarnished co-founder Peter Kazanjy says the idea emerged after realizing there can be a difference between job candidates’ attitudes in an interview and their attitudes after they’re hired. Time and money get wasted if a new employee doesn’t work out.
Any Unvarnished user can add a profile of a person to the site or write in an existing profile. If a profile of you is on the site, you can “claim” it and respond to reviews written about you. If nobody has written about you on Unvarnished but you want to solicit reviews, you can add yourself to the site and request that others describe you.
Kazanjy, previously a senior product marketing manager at VMware Inc., acknowledges that allowing people to write reviews without attaching their names entails trade-offs. Anonymity often unleashes nasty comments online. And it might make people more skeptical of the validity of Unvarnished’s reviews. But it also helps people write what they really think.
“We want to empower honesty and candor and nuance in the reviews,” he says.
Don’t bother hopping on your computer yet. Not just anyone can access www.getunvarnished.com because the site is in a private “beta” test. It’s not yet clear when it will be widely rolled out.
That means that to write or see any reviews, you have to be invited by a user and write a review of him or her. It also means that people could be writing reviews about you, good or bad, and you’d have no idea unless someone who can access the site told you.
A look around the site didn’t reveal that many negative reviews, however. Unvarnished requires users to rate people on a scale of one to five stars, and Kazanjy says more than 70 percent of the site’s thousands of reviews are four or five stars.
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