Kununu Recalculates: What the September Score Change Means for Employer Branding

Marcus

Oct 23

7 min read

There are few moments when an employer brand changes overnight without anyone having done anything for or against it. 1 September 2026 is one of them. Since that date, kununu has been calculating its employer score differently – in a way that makes older reviews practically meaningless. Anyone who coasted on a good stretch five years ago may well be looking at a different number on their profile these days. Without a single new piece of criticism.

For the platform itself, this is by its own account one of the biggest changes in a long time. For employer branding it is something else: the moment a metric that spent years being considered sluggish suddenly acquires an expiry date.

What Changes

The new logic is pleasantly uncomplicated. Depending on its age, every review enters the score with a different weight:

up to 1 year old: 100 percent
1 to 2 years: 75 percent
2 to 3 years: 50 percent
3 to 4 years: 25 percent
older than 4 years: 5 percent

An enthusiastic five-star review from 2021 therefore still counts for one twentieth. It does not disappear from the profile, it remains readable – but for the number that shows up in the Google preview and on the careers page, it barely matters any more.

kununu justifies the move by saying the score should better reflect how things currently stand inside a company. Google and Trustpilot have been calculating along the same lines for years.

A quick calculation makes the force of it visible. Take a company with forty reviews, thirty of them from the years 2019 to 2021 and ten from the past twelve months. Until now its score was three-quarters shaped by the old workforce. Under the new maths, those thirty reviews together carry no more weight than roughly one and a half current voices. The score is effectively the opinion of the ten most recent reviewers – and the smaller that group, the shakier it gets.

Anyone with little recent feedback does not just get a different number, but a more volatile one: a single new review can move the display noticeably.

Worth knowing: the recalculation runs on a rolling basis. There is no cut-off date on which everything shifts once and then settles down. With every birthday, a review automatically slides into the next lower weighting tier. A score that fits today can look different in twelve months purely through the passage of time.

The effect cuts both ways. Companies that built their profile between 2018 and 2021 and never touched it again are quietly losing points. Companies carrying an old burden of reviews – the difficult restructuring, the change at the top, the wave of layoffs – are conversely handed a window of opportunity the platform has never offered in this form before. Whoever collects feedback today overwrites their own past faster than ever.

The Signals Had Been Pointing to Recency for a While

This does not come out of nowhere. Anyone who looked at the criteria for the Top Company seal could see the direction of travel: the award requires at least seven reviews in total and 3.8 stars in both the overall and the employee score – plus 3.8 stars in the employee score for the past twelve months and at least two new reviews in the same period. So the seal logic has been rewarding recency for some time. Now the score is following suit.

That shifts what the number actually says. Until now, the kununu score was an approximate memory: everything ever said about a company, averaged out. From here on it is more of a sentiment barometer for the past eighteen months. That is considerably more useful for candidates – and considerably more uncomfortable for employers, because shortcomings can no longer even themselves out over time.

The change has not gone unchallenged. The main point of discussion in the HR community has been that a platform whose reviews are submitted anonymously and verified only to a limited extent now depends even more heavily on small, recent samples. Both are true – and neither changes the fact that the number is read in the market. Employer branding rarely has the luxury of choosing its own yardstick.

Recency Becomes a Metric

Anyone who has been reporting the score to the executive board has usually passed on two figures: the rating and the recommendation rate. From now on, both fall short. The more interesting question is: how old is the feedback our rating draws on?

A workable set of metrics consists of three figures:

First, the share of reviews from the past twelve months within the total stock – that is the real health indicator.

Second, the number of new reviews per quarter, ideally set as a target rather than left to chance.

Third, the response rate to reviews, because an unanswered criticism lands differently than one someone has visibly reacted to.

For this to become a steady flow rather than a frantic scramble in the autumn, it needs feedback touchpoints across the employee lifecycle. After onboarding, after the first year, on an internal move, on exit:

These are moments when people are thinking about their experience anyway. A note that a public review is possible belongs exactly there – and not in a blanket email to everyone once the score has slipped.

Where Actively Soliciting Reviews Stops Being Legitimate

And this is where it gets delicate, because the distance from "we send regular reminders" to "we arrange our own rating" is shorter than many would like. The legal line runs fairly clearly along two principles.

What is allowed is inviting everyone to review, without prescribing the direction. What is not allowed is review gating: first asking internally who is satisfied, and then sending only that group off to post a public review. The Regional Court of Hildesheim (Landgericht Hildesheim) classified this practice as anti-competitive back in 2021. Equally off limits: bonuses tied to a positive review, as well as purchased or invented reviews. Anyone offering incentives has to offer them to everyone equally and disclose them.

The pragmatic test for this is simple: would the request still sound the same if it were visible to everyone on the intranet – including the dissatisfied colleagues? If not, it is not a review strategy but cosmetics. And with a score that rewards recency, cosmetics only hold until the next round anyway.

A Quick Look Around: Who Reviews Employers Where?

In the DACH region – Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – kununu is the reference point, but it is far from the only place where employers are discussed. An overview of the platforms that genuinely matter:

kununu is the largest employer review platform in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with around 5.5 million reviews covering more than one million companies. It belongs to New Work SE and is closely interlinked with XING, the German-speaking professional network. Relevant for: practically every company that recruits in German – and from now on especially for anyone whose stock of reviews is older than four years.

Glassdoor and Indeed have officially been one entity since 1 July 2026: Indeed is the legal operator of Glassdoor, the brand remains in place, and profiles and reviews are growing together. For European employers that is good news, because Glassdoor has since aligned its complaint procedures with the requirements of the Digital Services Act. Relevant for: international employer brands, English-language roles, tech and corporate recruiting.

Google is the underrated platform. Not as a review portal of its own, but as display space: employer ratings from other platforms appear via structured data directly in Google's job search. On top of that come the reviews on the business profile, which draw no distinction between customers and employees. Relevant for: everyone – because for many people Google is the first place a company name gets typed.

Niche platforms such as MeinPraktikum.de, a German review site for internships, cover audiences that are barely visible on the large portals. Relevant for: apprenticeships, internships, working students, entry-level roles.

The recommendation behind this is unspectacular but effective: kununu as the compulsory programme, Glassdoor/Indeed as soon as recruiting goes international, Google as a sanity check with every campaign, niche portals deliberately where the target group sits.

What to Do Now

Anyone who has read this far already knows the task. Even so, it is worth translating into four steps that can be implemented within a quarter.

First, take stock: how is your own stock of reviews distributed across the five weighting tiers? That distribution says more about the vulnerability of the score than the score itself.

Second, tidy up the profiles – on kununu, on Glassdoor/Indeed and on the Google business profile. Incomplete profiles look to candidates like unlit shop windows.

Third, establish a response routine, with clear ownership and a reaction time that holds up even in stressful weeks; unpleasant reviews in particular deserve an answer, because they are the ones most often read.

And fourth, hang the feedback invitation on two or three fixed points in the employee lifecycle instead of letting it depend on the mood of the day.

Ultimately, the score change is less a question of algorithms than a question of attitude. A review platform that rewards recency punishes nobody for a difficult past. It punishes silence. And that, frankly, is the fairer rule.

Sources

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