A new web venture aims to offer employees an anonymous forum for rating employers and CEOs.

Glassdoor.com says it helps people “find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers.” The site is still in beta, meaning it hasn't fully launched, but it already contains some interesting information about technology heavyweights. There are even some entries about Canadian companies.

This is not a new concept. Rating services for university professors have been around (and causing controversy) for years. Monster.ca launched a similar imitative for workers in 2005, though that was a one-time survey. You can view the results here.

Glassdoor aims to dive deeper into work-related ratings and reviews. For example, employees are encouraged to rate the effectiveness of a company CEO and post reviews about their performance. As of this writing, 298 people that claim to be current or former employees of Microsoft have reviewed CEO Steve Ballmer. He earned a 4 out of 5, which rates him fairly high for CEO performance. But the reviews of him and the company run the gamut from very positive to completely negative.

“Since taking over, Ballmer has promoted other similarly-minded marketers around him, so now he's completely cocooned in layers of marketing fluff with absolutely no basis in reality,” writes one employee who says he/she left the company last year. “He doesn't know the difference between an actual product and a picture of a product.”

You can take a look at some of the reviews and ratings of Canadian companies here.

But that's only an initial sample. You need to sign in and complete a rating in order to be able to see all of the reviews and ratings on the site. One problem I encountered is that Glassdoor doesn't seem to allow you to enter a Canadian city as your place of employment. So my guess is that people wanting to review Canadian companies are simply entering in something like “New York” instead of Toronto. Hopefully that will be fixed once the site is out of beta.

Glassdoor is an interesting attempt to bring the online culture of reviews and ratings to the world of work. But one main factor will determine its usefulness: community. If it can attract tens of thousands of current and former employees and encourage them to offer honest assessments of employers, then the site will become a useful resource and barometer. But if its numbers stay small, or people submit dishonest reviews, it won't be useful.

So let's see how many people decide to push through the Glassdoor.