One user said Glassdoor pulled her full name from an email and added it to her profile. Another user said it wasn't clear how Glassdoor got his data.
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Glassdoor is introducing Blind-like anonymous community features to fuel user growth
Glassdoor, the platform known for anonymous salary and workplace reviews, is now introducing Blind-like community features for anonymous posting to fuel user growth. The company is leveraging its Fishbowl acquisition made in 2021 to port over features like interest bowls (interest-based communities) and company bowls. Glassdoor is also refreshing its branding with this launch.
The company is taking that step to bump up its active user base of 55 million — which stayed at the same level for nearly two years.
Glassdoor is introducing the communities feature — where users can post anonymously — to facilitate conversation based on interests, roles, and industry verticals. Users can choose to reveal part of their identity like job title and the organization they are working for while posting. The company has been testing these functions with a select set of users over the month. Now, it is rolling it out to all Glassdoor users across the web and mobile apps.
Image Credits: Glassdoor
With this migration, Glassdoor is also porting over 10,000 interest bowls and 30,000 company-specific bowls — where a company’s verified employees can chat about the workplace — from Fishbowl.
At the moment, Glassdoor automatically creates a company bowl when they see a significant number of employees of one organization on the platform. The company’s CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong said that the headcount threshold for creating a company bowl is not fixed. He noted that this feature is a “game changer” in learning about “employee sentiment” in real-time.
Sutherland-Wong told TechCrunch over a call that at the moment Fishbowl will remain active as a product despite most of the features and conversations appearing on Glassdoor.
Sutherland-Wong also mentioned that, over the last few years and because of the pandemic, there is a need for a conversational platform focused on workplaces. So they decided to acquire Fishbowl and work towards moving its features and community to Glassdoor.
“What we’ve seen the last three years — and particularly in the post-COVID world — is that the workplace experience has fundamentally changed. People are more distributed than ever. And you hear people feeling lonely, disconnected from their office and their colleagues,” he said.
Example of bowls on Glassdoor community Image Credits: Glassdoor
The company conducted a survey by The Harris Poll to find that 68% of U.S. workers wanted an anonymous forum to ask questions to coworkers and leaders within the company. Sutherland-Wong added that one of the reasons for launching the conversational platform was that there was not much to do on Glassdoor for users apart from when they were posting a review or looking for potential companies for jobs.
In 2021, the anonymous workplace conversation app Blind raised $37 million through investors like South Korea-based Mainstreet Investment along with Cisco Investments and Pavilion Capital. Reports suggest that the company said that the app has more than 8 million users on the platform.
Glassdoor has a comparatively larger user base which it would like to grow. It would like to attract some of Blind’s users to its own community platform as well. The company said that, while it wants to protect anonymity, it wants to differentiate its conversational product by creating a “constructive space.”
Given that Glassdoor is introducing a text-based platform, it will face moderation challenges like other social networks. At the moment, the company uses both human and machine-learning-based moderation, but it plans to build more tools like involving community moderators.
Sutherland-Wong said that the company doesn’t want to monetize the communities feature just yet. He said that Glassdoor’s main revenue stream remains ad spot for jobs, brand promotion, and connecting companies to potential employees. However, the company also mentioned that it wants to build features on top of company bowls to help companies get insights about employee feedback. There might be some premium features on the discussion forum in the future.
Glasdoor’s biggest competitor in the professional network space is LinkedIn, which has more than 900 million active users with tons of new features like AI-powered tools for posts and ad copies and verification for job posts.
Sutherland-Wong thinks that LinkedIn focuses on building someone’s identity and Glassdoor gives people the ability to be anonymous. He said that this makes the conversation happening on Glassdoor “real talk.” Earlier this year, Glassdoor let go off 140 people — almost 15% of its workforce.
Ravio is bringing real-time data to the talent fight
UK-based Ravio reckons real-time data is the best way to arm businesses to win the global talent war.
Its new-to-market compensation benchmarking tool lets users see how the compensation (wages and benefits) they offer their own staff compares to the market by pooling data across its employer customers (data is anonymized at the platform level) — idea being to help them offer more competitive packages which help convince talent to sign on the dotted line.
“Customers can explore market data and compare themselves to companies with similar characteristics such as location, industry, funding raised and headcount growth,” it writes of its SaaS platform in a press release accompanying the official launch today.
The software also lets companies “identify compensation inequalities at individual, job type and company levels — and compare to peers in the market”, as it tells it.
“Whether it be gender, background or other criteria, this offers the most detailed diversity insights available to companies who want to make data-driven changes,” is another top-line claim.
The startup, founded out of London, has been operating in stealth mode since starting building work on the platform in January, though it quietly opened up access a couple of weeks ago. (Research work and the idea itself dates back to last year.)
It is now flipping on the light today for its official launch — and also announcing a total of $10 million in seed funding led by Northzone with participation from Cherry Ventures and Spark Capital.
Ravio’s first target is fast growth scale-ups which are of course at the coal-face of the fight for talent. These high profile, high pressure startups are also often on the front line for diversity issues — where Ravio believes its SaaS tool will also provide valuable benchmarking.
“Hiring and retention is the biggest challenge right now for scaleups due to war for talent, fast moving markets, (over)funding, the shift to remote work and ‘the great resignation’,” argues co-CEO and co-founder, Raymond Siems.
“There’s a lot of clamour on closing pay and diversity gaps at startups but not many tangible numbers or practical solutions — it’s mostly high level reports and talk.”
The follow-on goal for Ravio is to deepen its database by getting more scale-ups signed up — and, ultimately, it hopes to be able to expand the approach to other sectors. After all, notes Siems, there are talent shortages across all sorts of sectors — so a tool that supports businesses to make more attractive compensation offers could have broad utility, assuming the benchmarking insights live up to billing.
“We’re starting focused but the need for a solution is universal across industries and company sizes, it’s not confined to the tech industry. We validated this during our research phase, with strong feedback from SMEs all the way up to large enterprises in other industries,” he tells TechCrunch.
“High growth startups are the best place to start because they’re the least served by traditional benchmarking providers, and are feeling the talent crunch the most. Employee equity in private companies is one of the least transparent areas within compensation, so we’re tackling this early on.
“By having a focused approach we can build depth in our dataset, before expanding into other sectors.”
Ravio works by a sharing to participate model which means that organizations that want access to its jobs benchmarking data must agree to share info on their own teams, including salary data.
The basic service is free but the team is building additional modules to layer on top that will be paid — so it’s taking a freemium approach to grease its data pipe.
“We gather data from ‘source of truth’ systems including the HRIS, ATS and cap table management software of our customers,” explains Siems. “We primarily connect via API, so there’s no manual work for our customers in submitting and drawing together data, and this enables real-time updates rather than one-off static submissions — which are inefficient and hard to scale.”
“We currently support 28 HR systems which cover all the major players in Europe including Workday, Personio, BambooHR, HiBob and Namely,” he adds.
Per Siems, Ravio’s automated, scalable data-pipeline approach is made possible because of widespread accessibility of employer data held in HR and other business systems via API — it just needs to convince employers to give it API access.
He does not sound concerned that Ravio won’t get a critical enough mass of sign-ups to be able to generate genuinely valuable compensation insights. “We’re set to expand quickly so the market coverage of our dataset will enable us to provide the most useful and granular insights available in Europe, and the only-real time information,” he responds to a question on how comprehensive a view of the market Ravio has at this stage, before reiterating that the benchmarking and compensation analytics product is free.
“It’s a self-service onboarding that can be done in 15 minutes — so it’s as simple as possible for companies to join,” he adds.
Siems also says Ravio is doing some of its own processing of the data it acquires from user companies so that it can extrapolate “beyond our market penetration”.
This “special sauce” incorporates “macro data to predict wider trends”, per Siems, who points to what he says is the most “sophisticated” compensation work currently being done — “by internal teams at big tech players like Meta” — as the team’s inspiration. He says Ravio has also hired people who have experience working on compensation for Big Tech firms including Amazon and Meta, as well as other multinationals like Coca-Cola.
“They buy data from all of the major consultancies and then do their own data science work to build up a more detailed and comprehensive picture. We want to enable this depth and sophistication for companies of all sizes,” he says, adding: “We’re bringing a data science first approach into an area where there has been very little innovation, with a strong data science team from Cambridge and Oxford.”
Ravio isn’t disclosing the total number of scale-ups which signed up pre-launch but Siems, claims it’s already got a “healthy” list of customers who “heard about what we are building and wanted to join our testing phase”.
“Some of the names we’re working with include unicorns Deliveroo, Truelayer, Flink, Zego and other high-growth European startups including Healx, Zoomo and Plum Guide,” he says.
The paid version of the SaaS will be charged based on the number of employees the user has, according to Siems.
“We’re charging for advanced features and two additional modules that we’re releasing in the coming months: Manage and Communicate,” he notes, describing two of the premium products it has in the works. “Our Communicate module includes interactive offer letters for candidates, and a compensation portal for employees, to make it easier for them to understand every part of their package and their employer. This includes education on commonly misunderstood topics like equity and tax.
“Our Manage module provides a suite of tools to allow companies to manage compensation processes effortlessly. This includes organisation level budgeting and banding features, compensation review cycle management workflows, and growth scenario planning.”
On diversity, how ‘full spectrum’ Ravio’s proposition can be is less clear — given Siems says the data available to it “varies by company”.
“We’re seeing the most commonly available data relates to gender, age, country of citizenship, marital status and ethnicity — but increasingly HR systems are supporting wider data fields such as disability status, so we’ll be expanding our analytics as the data allows,” he says on that.
While employers having better data on competitive rates of pay and broader compensation packages might be good for businesses to win talent, there is a question of whether this necessarily benefits employees — who aren’t being directly empowered to, for example, call out wage gaps inside their own organization, say if certain groups are being paid below market rates, since the tool looks intended for use by the HR department, rather than for general access.
Asked about the risk of one-way real-time information disproportionately empowering employers, Ravio says: “We will be releasing market reports that are freely available — covering both compensation and diversity — that will empower both candidates and other employers.”
“We believe that many of the current inequities in the market are not a result of bad intentions but rather the result of a lack of data,” he adds. “By becoming an objective source of information for employers in a notoriously opaque and difficult to understand space, Ravio’s product will ultimately benefit employees by empowering companies to make unbiased decisions.”
Flush with seed funding and post-official-launch, the team’s focus for the rest of this year is on growth in Europe — where Siems says they spy “huge opportunity”.
“However the talent war is global so we will be quickly expanding our reach to new shores next year,” he adds, noting the startup has grabbed backing from a number of international investors. He also flags the experience of his co-founders, Roy Blanga and Merten Wulfert, in helping to rapidly scale Deliveroo, Groupon and HotelTonight internationally — claiming: “We’re well positioned to execute on our vision.”
On the competitive front, Ravio’s view is “there’s very little on the fairness and team analytics side” — with most of the action focused on compensation benchmarking. So it will presumably be weighting its offering there.
“In some ways we are building a new age version of ‘salary surveys’ and compensation benchmarking services offered by Radford, Towers Watson and Mercer (the big 3 players) which have been around for decades,” Siems suggests, adding: “There is no one offering real-time data in Europe to our knowledge. Some new players are serving tech companies but only with static, manually collected data. In the US there are some new players and older static offerings like Option Impact.
“It’s also possible that HRIS players (e.g. Personio) will look to build their own version but with the market for HR tech being so fragmented — it will be tricky to get worthwhile breadth of data long term. The market is better structured for there to be a HRIS/ATS/Cap table agnostic player like us.”
Glassdoor does already pool user-contributed salary data — so can offer a snapshot of pay rates — but Siems believes Ravio is not directly competing since Glassdoor’s data is unverified, “patchy”, collected via one-off submissions and lacks enough breadth or depth to be useful to companies making compensation decisions.
“Companies need comprehensive data,” he argues. “It also doesn’t have access to information to enable team or fairness analytics.”
Commenting on Ravio’s seed in a statement, Michiel Kotting, partner at Northzone, said: “We see a huge market shift happening which is going to leave behind companies who don’t modernise their approach around compensation. Winning companies will be transparent with compensation in the context of rising prices (inflation, cost of living, logistic costs) and a tighter talent market, especially in tech. Roy, Merten and Raymond are going after a problem that all companies big or small have, and are poised to build a leading company in the category. They have the experience and leadership to tackle all things compensation from salaries to equity and benefits, all big pain points for fast-growing companies.”
As human capital grows scarce, flexible compensation can help attract and retain talent
The Great Resignation is among the most significant events in recent U.S. history. We are seeing a post-COVID-19 generation refusing to work under the same conditions as they did before. The U.S. is facing the most prominent labor shortage of the decade, and positions that require high-demand skills are harder than ever to fill.
Midsized companies are finding it particularly hard to retain qualified personnel. Confronted by notable resource constraints, smaller budgets and workers’ demand for flexible solutions, the problems for SMBs are as great or even more significant than for larger organizations.
One way to make your company attractive is by developing attractive compensation strategies and increasing pay transparency and equity. Employees don’t always leave or stay because of their pay, but an opaque model for allocating compensation exacerbates feelings of disconnection and lowers engagement.
Let’s dive into how startups can benefit from compensation analysis, and how they can utilize available data to develop a comprehensive compensation strategy.
Understanding the complexity of compensation
Pay equity is one of the most pressing social issues today, and any discrepancies can have adverse spillover effects on reputation and company relationships.
The amount that lands in an employees’ bank account is just one fragment of today’s compensation packages. Compensation can consist of a base salary, annual cash bonuses and long-term incentives.
When stirring a compensation mix together, there are different trade-offs to consider:
- Fixed versus variable compensation: Base salary compared with bonuses.
- Long-term incentives versus short-term incentives: Short-term incentives can be in the form of annual bonus structures. Long-term incentives are usually stock or other forms of compensation that vest over the years.
- Cash versus equity: Equity can include stock options, restricted stock and performance shares.
- Group incentives versus individual incentives: You could implement a percentage-based salary increase for all positions or give bonuses to select employees.
It isn’t ideal to have a uniform policy for all positions and departments. Managers should explain their reward decisions on an individual level, and compensation decisions should reflect the skills and contributions of every employee. In addition, companies are bound to have varying budgets (e.g., higher revenue during the holiday seasons) and philosophies on allocating them.
Many make the mistake of sticking to an approach that doesn’t pan out from a strategic standpoint or doesn’t motivate the team enough. Instead, managers should gather data, work through various analyses and scenarios and design a compensation strategy tailored to the company. This is where compensation management software comes into play.
The devil is in the data
Data will help you understand where the talent market is headed and where your company stands.
F5 acquires cloud security startup Threat Stack for $68 million
Applications networking company F5 has announced it’s acquiring Threat Stack, a Boston-based cloud security and compliance startup, for $68 million.
The deal, which comes months after F5 bought multi-cloud management startup Volterra for $500 million, sees the 25-year-old company looking to bolster its cloud security portfolio as applications become a growing focus for cybercriminals. Businesses lose more than $100 billion a year to attacks targeting digital experiences, F5 says and these experiences are increasingly powered by applications distributed across multiple environments and interconnected through APIs.
Threat Stack, which was founded in November 2012 and has since amassed more than $70 million across six funding rounds including a $45 million Series C round led by F-Prime Capital Partners and Eight Roads Ventures, specializes in cloud security for applications and provides customers with real-time threat detection for cloud infrastructure and workloads. Unlike many cloud security tools that kick in after an intrusion, Threat Stack takes a more proactive approach, alerting organizations to all known vulnerabilities and providing a report on the holes that need to be plugged.
The startup’s intrusion detection platform, the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform, works across cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and containerized environments, and is perhaps best known for its Slack integration that alerts DevOps teams to security concerns in real-time. Threat Stack has a number of big-name customers, according to its website, including Glassdoor, Ping Identity and Proofpoint.
F5 says that integrating its application and API protection solutions with Threat Stack’s cloud security capabilities and expertise will enhance visibility across application infrastructure and workloads, making it easier for customers to adopt consistent security in any cloud.
“Applications are the backbone of today’s modern businesses, and protecting them is mission-critical for our customers,” said Haiyan Song, EVP of Security at F5. “Threat Stack brings technology and talent that will strengthen F5’s security capabilities and further our adaptive applications vision with broader cloud observability and actionable security insights for customers.”
The acquisition, which is expected to close in F5’s first-quarter fiscal year 2022, is subject to closing conditions.
Beware the hidden bias behind TikTok resumes
Social media has served as a launchpad to success almost as long as it has been around. The stories of going viral from a self-produced YouTube video and then securing a record deal established the mythology of social media platforms. Ever since, social media has consistently gravitated away from text-based formats and toward visual mediums like video sharing.
For most people, a video on social media won’t be a ticket to stardom, but in recent months, there have been a growing number of stories of people getting hired based on videos posted to TikTok. Even LinkedIn has embraced video assets on user profiles with the recent addition of the “Cover Story” feature, which allows workers to supplement their profiles with a video about themselves.
As technology continues to evolve, is there room for a world where your primary resume is a video on TikTok? And if so, what kinds of unintended consequences and implications might this have on the workforce?
Why is TikTok trending for jobs?
In recent months, U.S. job openings have risen to an all-time high of 10.1 million. For the first time since the pandemic began, available jobs have exceeded available workers. Employers are struggling to attract qualified candidates to fill positions, and in that light, it makes sense that many recruiters are turning to social platforms like TikTok and video resumes to find talent.
But the scarcity of workers does not negate the importance of finding the right employee for a role. Especially important for recruiters is finding candidates with the skills that align with their business’ goals and strategy. For example, as more organizations embrace a data-driven approach to operating their business, they need more people with skills in analytics and machine learning to help them make sense of the data they collect.
Recruiters have proven to be open to innovation where it helps them find these new candidates. Recruiting is no longer the manual process it used to be, with HR teams sorting through stacks of paper resumes and formal cover letters to find the right candidate. They embraced the power of online connections as LinkedIn rose to prominence and even figured out how to use third-party job sites like GlassDoor to help them draw in promising candidates. On the back end, many recruiters use advanced cloud software to sort through incoming resumes to find the candidates that best match their job descriptions. But all of these methods still rely on the traditional text-based resume or profile as the core of any application.
Videos on social media provide the ability for candidates to demonstrate soft skills that may not be immediately apparent in written documents, such as verbal communication and presentation skills. They are also a way for recruiters to learn more about the personality of the candidate to determine how they’d fit into the culture of the company. While this may be appealing for many, are we ready for the consequences?
We’re not ready for the close-up
While innovation in recruiting is a big part of the future of work, the hype around TikTok and video resumes may actually take us backward. Despite offering a new way for candidates to market themselves for opportunities, it also carries potential pitfalls that candidates, recruiters and business leaders need to be aware of.
The very element that gives video resumes their potential also presents the biggest problems. Video inescapably highlights the person behind the skills and achievements. As recruiters form their first opinions about a candidate, they will be confronted with information they do not usually see until much later in the process, including whether they belong to protected classes because of their race, disability or gender.
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) concerns have had a major surge in attention over the last couple of years amid heightened awareness and scrutiny around how employers are — or are not — prioritizing diversity in the workplace.
But evaluating candidates through video could erase any progress made by introducing more opportunities for unconscious, or even conscious, bias. This could create a dangerous situation for businesses if they do not act carefully because it could open them up to consequences such as damage to their reputation or even something as severe as discrimination lawsuits.
A company with a poor track record for diversity may have the fact that they reviewed videos from candidates used against them in court. Recruiters reviewing the videos may not even be aware of how the race or gender of candidates are impacting their decisions. For that reason, many of the businesses I have seen implement an option for video in their recruiting flow do not allow their recruiters to watch the video until late in the recruiting process.
But even if businesses address the most pressing issues of DE&I by managing bias against those protected classes, by accepting videos there are still issues of diversity in less protected classes such as neurodiversity and socioeconomic status. A candidate with exemplary skills and a strong track record may not present themselves well through a video, coming across as awkward to the recruiter watching the video. Even if that impression is irrelevant to the job, it could still influence the recruiter’s stance on hiring.
Furthermore, candidates from affluent backgrounds may have access to better equipment and software to record and edit a compelling video resume. Other candidates may not, resulting in videos that may not look as polished or professional in the eyes of the recruiter. This creates yet another barrier to the opportunities they can access.
As we sit at an important crossroads in how we handle DE&I in the workplace, it is important for employers and recruiters to find ways to reduce bias in the processes they use to find and hire employees. While innovation is key to moving our industry forward, we have to ensure top priorities are not being compromised.
Not left on the cutting room floor
Despite all of these concerns, social media platforms — especially those based on video — have created new opportunities for users to expand their personal brands and connect with potential job opportunities. There is potential to use these new systems to benefit both job seekers and employers.
The first step is to ensure that there is always a place for a traditional text-based resume or profile in the recruiting process. Even if recruiters can get all the information they need about a candidate’s capabilities from video, some people will just naturally feel more comfortable staying off camera. Hiring processes need to be about letting people put their best foot forward, whether that is in writing or on video. And that includes accepting that the best foot to put forward may not be your own.
Instead, candidates and businesses should consider using videos as a place for past co-workers or managers to endorse the candidate. An outside endorsement can do a lot more good for an application than simply stating your own strengths because it shows that someone else believes in your capabilities, too.
Video resumes are hot right now because they are easier to make and share than ever and because businesses are in desperate need of strong talent. But before we get caught up in the novelty of this new way of sharing our credentials, we need to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for success.
The goal of any new recruiting technology should be to make it easier for candidates to find opportunities where they can shine without creating new barriers. There are some serious kinks to work out before video resumes can achieve that, and it is important for employers to consider the repercussions before they damage the success of their DE&I efforts.
Glassdoor acquires Fishbowl, a semi-anonymous social network and job board, to square up to LinkedIn
While LinkedIn doubles down on creators to bring a more human, less manicured element to its networking platform for professionals, a company that has built a reputation for publishing primarily the more messy and human impressions of work life has made an acquisition that might help it compete better with LinkedIn.
Glassdoor, the platform that lets people post anonymous and candid feedback about the organizations they work for, has acquired Fishbowl — an app that gives users an anonymous option also to provide frank employee feedback, as well as join interest-based conversation groups to chat about work, and search for jobs. Glassdoor, which has 55 million users, is already integrating Fishbowl content into its main platform, although Fishbowl, with its 1 million users, will also continue for now to operate as a standalone app, too.
Christian Sutherland-Wong, the CEO of Glassdoor, said that he sees Fishbowl as the logical evolution of how Glassdoor is already being used. Similarly, since people are already seeking out feedback on prospective employers, it makes sense to bring recruitment and reviews closer together.
“We’ve always been about workplace transparency,” he said in an interview. “We expect in the future that jobseekers will use Glassdoor reviews, and also look to existing professionals in their fields to get answers from each other.” Fishbowl has seen a lot of traction during the Covid-19 pandemic, growing its user base threefold in the last year.
The acquisition is technically being made by Recruit Holdings, the Japanese employment listings and tech giant that acquired Glassdoor for $1.2 billion in 2018, and the companies are not disclosing any financial terms. San Francisco-based Fishbowl — founded in 2016 by Matt Sunbulli and Loren Appin — had raised less than $8 million, according to PitchBook data, from a pretty impressive set of investors, including Binary Capital, GGV, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Scott Belsky.
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn towers over the likes of Glassdoor in terms of size. It now has more than 774 million users, making it by far the biggest social media platform targeting professionals and their work-related content. But for many, even some of those who use it, the platform leaves something to be desired.
LinkedIn is a reliable go-to for putting out a profile of yourself, for the public, for those in your professional life, or for recruiters, to find. But what LinkedIn largely lacks are normal people talking about work in an honest way. To read about other’s often self-congratulatory professional developments, or to see motivational words on professional development from already hugely successful personalities, or to browse developments relative to your industry that probably have already seen elsewhere is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s anodyne. Sometimes people just want tea to be spilled.
That’s where something like Glassdoor comes into the picture: the format of making comments anonymous on there turns it into something of the anti-LinkedIn. It is caustic, perhaps sometimes bitter, talk about the workplace, balanced out with positive words seem to get periodically suspected of being seeded by the companies themselves. Motivational, inspirational and aspirational are generally not part of the Glassdoor lexicon; honest, illuminating, and sobering perhaps are.
Fishbowl will be used to augment this and give Glassdoor another set of tools now to see how it might build out its platform beyond workplace reviews. The idea is to target people who come to Glassdoor to read about what people think of a company, or to put in their own comments: they can now also jump into conversations with others; and if they are coming to complain about their employer, now they can also look for a new one!
In the meantime, it feels like the swing to more authenticity is also a result of the shift we’ve seen in the world of work.
Covid-19 mandated office closures and social distancing have meant that many professionals have been working at home for the majority of the last year and a half (and many continue to do so). That has changed how we “come to work”, with many of our traditional divides between work and non-work personas and time management blurring. That has had an inevitable impact on how we see ourselves at work, and what we seek to get out of that engagement. And it also has led many people to feel isolated and in need of more ways to connect with colleagues.
Glassdoor’s acquisition, it said, was in part to meet this demand. A Harris Poll commissioned by Glassdoor found that 48% of employees felt isolated from coworkers during the COVID-19 pandemic; 42% of employees felt their career stall due to the lack of in-person connection; and 45% of employees expect to work hybrid or full-time remotely going forward — all areas that Glassdoor believes can be addressed with better tools (like Fishbowl) for people to communicate.
Of course, it will remain to be seen whether Glassdoor can convert its visitors to use the new Fishbowl-powered tools, but if there really is a population of users out there looking for a new kind of LinkedIn — there certainly are enough who love to complain about it — then maybe this cold be one version of that.
Pushing for an ‘apolitical’ workplace is immoral (and unrealistic)
“We are not a social impact company. No more societal and political discussions on our company account.”
That’s been the recent message from a number of tech CEOs who have declared that they want the companies they run to be “apolitical” and employees to focus solely on the goals of growing revenue and driving profit.
That’s left me wondering: What might that mean for me as an LGBTQIA+ person in the workplace?
I don’t consider myself a particularly political person. I just want to do a good job, be a supportive team member and leader, and play a valuable role in the organization that employs me. I’m lucky to work as chief information security officer at Elastic, a software company that prioritizes inclusivity and acceptance for all employees, telling us to come as we are.
When we consider who gets to define what’s political or not, we need to think hard about the level of privilege they enjoy — and whom they might be excluding from everyday workplace conversations.
But what if things were different?
If I worked for a different company, would being a gay woman who’s out at work make me “political?” Would talking with colleagues about my home life and my family be considered a political act?
It would all depend, I guess, on whom you asked. I’m well aware that, to certain people, being out in the workforce might be considered political — but I’m just being open and transparent about who I am.
Staying in the shadows
When we consider who gets to define what’s political or not, we need to think hard about the level of privilege they enjoy — and whom they might be excluding from everyday workplace conversations.
Managers and executives who insist on an apolitical workplace are inevitably asking some employees, particularly those belonging to historically underrepresented groups, to stay in the shadows, to keep quiet about who they are.
I’ve been there and I’ve felt the impact firsthand. Earlier in my career, I hid my sexual orientation. I wore a virtual mask at work, and it was exhausting and stressful to have to worry about who knew my “secret” and what might happen if the truth got out.
It was also a significant distraction from doing my job. Even if bosses aren’t concerned about the emotional impact of mandating an apolitical workplace on their employees, they might at the very least consider the productivity impact.
A recent survey from online careers site Glassdoor found that LGBTQ+ employees are less satisfied at work compared to their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts, and that while certain companies and industries are highly rated by LGBTQ+ employees, many others still have considerable progress to make.
Since it’s no secret that less satisfied employees are likely to be less engaged, that could potentially send corporate metrics that focus on productivity, performance and retention into a nosedive.
Conversely, a 2020 report published by strategy firm McKinsey suggests that diversity helps organizations increase innovation, reconsider entrenched ways of thinking and improve financial performance — but also stresses that they only enjoy these benefits if all employees feel a sense of inclusion. The study’s authors define this as “the degree to which an individual feels that their authentic selves are welcomed at work, enabling them to contribute in a meaningful and deliberate manner.”
The firm’s survey of almost 2,000 employees, across a wide range of companies and industries worldwide, shows clearly that women, respondents from ethnic and racial minorities, and people who identify as LGBTQ+ still encounter additional challenges to feeling included.
Working from home
On top of all this, it’s not realistic to ask people to leave their personal lives and beliefs at home after huge numbers of employees began working from home on a full-time basis amid the pandemic, many for the first time ever. If strict lines between their personal and professional lives were clearer for some employees pre-COVID, those days are almost certainly over.
While the pandemic forced many organizations to restructure the workplace, I’ve been working in a fully remote, distributed environment since joining Elastic in 2018. This has shaped how I manage my team because every individual has their own perceptions and experiences, all of which can be more challenging to identify in a distributed workforce. In particular, I’ve learned that building an inclusive, high-functioning team starts with empathetic leadership.
For me, it’s all about being present, asking questions and not making assumptions. When everyone is working in their own environment, it’s easy to postulate about how someone’s feeling about their work or a particular project, because that’s human nature — but the danger here is that we jump to the negative. Staying curious and seeking to understand is key at all times.
Above all, it’s about inclusion and acceptance. Giving everyone the freedom to express what’s on their mind. That’s how everyone should feel about their workplace, and it’s the environment I will continue to work to foster for my own team — because oftentimes, the personal is political, and companies are made up of people, not products.
5 companies doing growth marketing right
What do all companies, regardless of industry, say they want? Growth. Lighting-fast, continuous growth. The good news is you can quickly learn which growth marketing strategies work by studying other companies’ success and adapting it to your own business.
Most technophiles remember Dropbox’s referral program — the one that helped it grow 3,900% in 15 months. Its philosophy was simple: reward customers with free storage space for referring other customers. In 2008, it was an absolute revelation. A golden ticket.
Tell a story with your business’ proprietary data. You’re the only one with this information, and that makes it valuable.
In 2021, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company without a formal referral program. It’s a standard growth marketing trick. If you study other companies’ tactics, you’re going to be able to shortcut growth — it’s as simple as that.
The race to grow faster is more pressing than ever before. When you consider the speed with which venture capital funds need to return dollars to their investors and that consumer acquisition costs have increased by 55% over the last three years, forward-thinking entrepreneurs and growth marketers simply must make time to study their competition, learn best practices and apply them to their own business growth.
Of course, you should still run your own experiments, but it’s just more capital-efficient to emulate than to trial-and-error from scratch. Here are five companies with growth strategies worth emulating — including the most important lessons you can begin applying to your business today.
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1. Doing SEO right: Flo
SEO is going to spend this summer shaking in its boots. Google began rolling out a two-week core algorithm update on June 2, and it’s unleashing a page experience update through August. These updates usually come with significant volatility that makes organic Google rankings jump all over the place.
However, one clear winner of the 2021 SEO footrace is Flo, a women’s ovulation calendar, period tracker and pregnancy app. According to GrowthBar, a SEO tool I co-founded, Flo’s organic traffic has soared 192% over the past two months and it ranks on page one for some staggeringly competitive women’s health keywords.
If SEO is a strategy you’re pursuing, there are two key growth lessons to take away from Flo’s recent success.
1. Authority matters now more than ever. Healthcare websites fall into a category of sensitive sites that Google classifies as Your Money, Your Life (YMYL). Because of oodles of fake news and suspect web content, Google has rightfully raised its bar for expertise and factuality. Go to any one of Flo’s more than 1,000 blog posts (yes, content is still king) and you’ll see that nearly all of them are reviewed by gynecologists, primary care physicians or some other type of women’s health expert. Its site also has pages devoted to its writers and medical reviewers, content guidelines and peer-review specifications. Flo takes its information seriously. From the 2020 election to QAnon to vaccination side effects, Google is on high alert. Whatever your niche, you need to establish credibility to win Google searches.
Glassdoor now lets you filter company reviews by demographics
Despite efforts from companies to create equitable environments, it’s clear that employees of a certain demographics, like Black women, sometimes have very different experiences from their counterparts. Glassdoor aims to better surface those experiences through a new feature that allows folks to filter ratings by demographics.
Up until now, Glassdoor only presented an overall ranking for a specific company, so there was no way to easily determine if, for example, Black women feel the same as white men, or if Latino men feel similarly to Asian men. In addition to race, Glassdoor now allows people to filter by gender identity, parental or caregiver status, disability, sexual orientation and veteran status.
Overall, Black employees are less satisfied at work in comparison to all employees, according to new preliminary research from Glassdoor. The research is based on the more than 187,000 employees across more than 3,300 companies who have provided demographic data.
Image Credits: Glassdoor
That same research showed Apple had the highest overall company rating among Black employees, with an average rating of 4.2 out of five. Apple’s overall company rating from that sample size is 3.9.
“Because these data are so new — having been collected within just the last four months — it’s important to resist the urge to make sweeping claims based on early data,” Glassdoor Data Scientist Amanda Stansell and Chief Economist Andrew Chamberlain said in the report. “The averages we’ve reported above are not derived from representative probability samples of company workforces — they represent data shared anonymously by Glassdoor users at this time. Readers should therefore take some caution in making conclusive, company-wide inferences about the state of race and employee satisfaction.”