It’s not just about the work; it’s about making the workplace work for you.
Increasingly, that’s the message HR professionals are hearing loud and clear. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021 alone, a historic number that bears out a more recent estimation (by Willis Towers Watson’s 2022 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey) that 44 percent of workers are now seeking new jobs.
Covid-19 may have precipitated the Great Resignation. But as the country gradually reopens, it’s clear the mass exodus is far from over. With great talent in high demand and short supply, it has additionally become clear that job-seekers are searching for more than just a steady salary.
“We’re at a transformative moment in the world of work,” said Sarah Wicker, chief people officer at Via. “People are fundamentally asking themselves, ‘What really matters to me?’”
At the rideshare company, which aims to provide commuters with equitable access to transit, Wicker has sensed that perks and amenities are not enough. Even a highly competitive salary won’t lure prospective employees on the fence about the impact they’ll be able to make at work.
With candidates prioritizing a sense of overall meaning in their job search, Wicker believes companies like hers are perfectly positioned to attract talented people who want to make a difference. “At Via, our work is fundamentally mission-driven,” she said. The company ensures that every employee understands the essential nature of their work and sees how their contributions fit into Via’s bigger picture — and also makes sure that bigger picture aligns with each employee’s own career goals.
Below, Wicker and six other professionals at competitive, fast-growing tech companies discuss their approach to attracting and retaining top talent.
As a leading provider of guaranteed fraud protection, Signifyd helps businesses better control fraud and abuse. With its end-to-end commerce protection platform, the fintech company has netted several Fortune 1000 and Digital Commerce 360 Top 500 customers. Along the way, it’s cemented a nurturing company culture that ensures employees thrive as people so that they can bring their best selves to work.
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
Signifyd has a unique blend; we’re a performance-driven yet also incredibly human culture. We sincerely believe that we don’t have to choose between results and humanity. We hire excellent people, then we operate from a place of trust and ownership to ensure that they have the flexibility and freedom to achieve a sustainable work/life balance. This results in an environment where employees feel trusted to take risks, be innovative and step outside their comfort zones.
We are remote-first, with full flexibility for employees to choose if and when they utilize our office spaces. We also recently moved to a four-day work week after a long and successful pilot process. We are fortunate to have the foundational building blocks to make this program successful from a business and people perspective.
What are a few strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
Career ladders for all positions in the company provide visibility into an employee’s potential growth and future trajectory. Individual development plans for employees allow us to get alignment and mutual commitment from team members and their managers in areas of growth and development. Quarterly comprehensive engagement surveys give us the ability to distill results down to the manager level; this puts ownership for improvement and action items on the managers, while ensuring that employees feel heard and that changes are being made to improve areas of opportunity.
Finally, we keep a deep, sincere focus on putting our team’s health and well-being first, both through programs and tools — such as unlimited PTO in the U.S. and free access to online mental health resources for all employees — and through our leadership team’s consistent embrace and support of this concept.
How has Signifyd adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last couple of years? And what steps have you taken to create a workplace that meets those needs?
We were fortunate to have the bedrock cultural elements before the pandemic that have allowed a relatively seamless transition to a virtual environment. Prior to the pandemic, we had a largely distributed team and so we had optimized our work environment with tools and processes that would enable collaboration across time zones, geographies and teams. We did not rely exclusively on in-person contact.
We decided to introduce the concept of wellness days and ultimately to make a four-day work week permanent.”
That said, Covid-19 did shine a light on the need to make certain changes to combat burnout and the bleeding of work into personal life that we saw happening. This was precisely why we decided to introduce the concept of wellness days and ultimately to make a four-day work week permanent. Our employees continued to show up for us and make our business incredibly successful during the pandemic, so we believe the least we can do is believe that they will continue to do so with clearer boundaries and greater emphasis on prioritizing their health and wellness.
For ride-hailing system Via, the mission is clear: to develop and operate efficient and affordable public mobility solutions, getting people where they need to go. Internally, the company is equally forthright about supporting its employees, both on a day-to-day basis and in terms of their long-term career goals.
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
The tech industry has always been competitive when it comes to talent. Historically, companies have tried to stand out through offering bespoke perks, amenities and highly competitive salaries. These are important, and we’ve had to think about how we adapt these offerings to provide the same level of value in remote and hybrid work environments. But more than ever, we are seeing candidates prioritize impact, meaning and opportunity in their work over other criteria.
We’re building technology that meaningfully enhances the efficiency, accessibility and carbon footprint of transportation networks. For our talent team, the focus has been on helping candidates understand how their role fits into this wider mission and directly advances these goals. That means making sure the entire organization understands recruitment as a two-way street. The candidate’s assessment of you is equally as important as your assessment of them. We ask everyone, including senior leadership, to spend meaningful time with candidates at all position levels. It’s an investment, but it’s allowed us to build and retain an extremely collaborative team of smart, optimistic and kind people.
The candidate’s assessment of you is equally as important as your assessment of them.”
What are a couple of your key strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
Everyone loves cold brew, but for our team the focus has been to think beyond conventional “perks.” The last few years have been extremely challenging; people have experienced tremendous turmoil and, in many cases, loss. It’s our job as a team to recognize this and invest in a holistic set of programs that help employees feel their best physically, mentally and emotionally.
Our benefits start on day one, so new hires can immediately access programs like One Medical, Aaptiv and Headspace. We are really proud of the work we’ve done with Percent Pledge to build an employer-matched platform for employees to contribute to causes that matter to them. We also recently introduced paid time off for volunteer work, as we heard from many employees that having time to give back to their communities was a high priority.
Providing opportunities for mentorship and career development is also a high priority. We’re extremely fortunate to partner with the Posse Foundation, an organization that empowers college students from diverse backgrounds to be strong leaders. Several of the participants in the program have joined the Via team full-time after graduation.
How has Via adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last couple of years?
We ran a survey to ask people’s preferences when it came to returning to the office. I think we literally had almost as many different ideas as we have employees. So for us as a people team, that meant a shift in mentality from creating one way of working that works for everyone to supporting employees on their own terms. We’ve always had a philosophy that prioritizes quality of work over visibility of hours, and we hear from employees that now more than ever this flexibility is vital in order to manage the realities of school closures and care obligations, to name just two.
Moving to a model where offices are open for those who want to come in, but employees are free to make that choice for themselves, was one example of this. Some employees have moved and committed to permanent remote work. Others have spoken about how isolating it was to be at home for so long; these employees have relished the opportunity to spend face-to-face time with their peers. Most are starting to settle into a hybrid pattern.
At AvePoint, which provides an advanced platform for SaaS and data management to optimize SaaS operations and secure collaboration, Henningson said recruiters lean on one key element of the company culture to persuade prospective employees: “We are ourselves!”
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
We’ve hired so much great talent over the years, and one common piece of positive feedback I receive from our interview process concerns the fact that we present our core values, even in the initial meeting stages. We tell you what it would be like to be our colleague and identify how your experiences and motivations translate to a role at AvePoint.
What are a couple of your key strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
AvePoint is a stable, 20-year-old company but continues to embrace the high-growth, high-passion, founder-led vibe that you might feel in a start-up. It’s truly the perfect mix. We are in our first year of being publicly traded, so we have added perks involving equity and development resources. We put energy into our colleagues’ growth and development — both in individual contributor and leadership capacities.
We put energy into our colleagues’ growth and development — both in individual contributor and leadership capacities.”
How has AvePoint adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last couple of years?
Our colleagues desire flexibility, and moving to a flexible working approach was an easier transition for AvePoint than most. We were set up with the proper technology before the pandemic started and continued along that path during the lockdowns to present. We also don’t make decisions in a silo. We find that it’s important to listen to our colleagues and take appropriate action as a team. We offer different outlets to source various perspectives and feedback, whether in our quarterly town halls, business reviews or leader’s forum. We want to hear the good and the bad, then make it productive.
Away wants to inspire people to get away more. It’s only fitting, given this, that the company’s culture celebrates taking time off together with corporate well-being days and an array of other benefits intended to get employees moving wherever they want to go.
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
As a purpose-driven company, we are deeply connected to our mission. We have evolved who we are as a brand, and we’ve been intentional about how we are showing up to our customers, employees and communities. What makes us stand out is that common thread between our mission and vision as a company and who we are as an employer.
What we offer in our product — to meet our customers where they are — we’ve made sure that we follow with our employees. That means we’re evolving to meet their needs. Employers can show up for their employees in many different ways. We want to be clear on our commitments to our people, identify what we can do and focus on doing those things really well.
We made a conscious decision to be intentional about the benefits that we offer to our employees and evolve our programs, based on employee feedback, to ultimately support the long-term personal and professional growth of our team. Given this, we made an investment choice very early on as a company to implement a 401(k) matching program for our employees.
Employers can show up for their employees in many different ways.”
What are a couple of your key strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
By introducing career frameworks, it helps to ensure employees understand what growth looks like, so that they can have informed conversations with their managers. It empowers people to make informed decisions about their career all while providing clarity on how they might proceed at the company. Investment in talent management platform Lattice allows for visibility of past feedback to a new manager, to ensure employee growth conversations are continuous and not disrupted by any organization changes, as well as 360-degree feedback collection aimed at removing bias.
We also recognized that, even with PTO and leave policies, there is something inherently impactful about the company, as a collective, taking time off. As a result, we implemented corporate wellbeing days so that our teams can together take the time that they need to unplug, rest and recharge. Additionally, starting and growing a family is hard, and time off during this stage is invaluable. Compounded by the fact that in 2020 we saw a disproportionate number of women dropping out of the workforce to be the primary caregiver for their family, we made the decision to implement a gender-neutral leave policy available to all new parents at Away.
How has Away adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last couple of years?
We made intentional evolutions to what we offer our employees as a direct result of employee feedback we gather through various surveys — including AllVoices, an anonymous reporting platform that we recently rolled out. When we looked to define and implement our hybrid work model as a reaction to the pandemic, we used that as an opportunity to evolve ways of working at Away that align with our mission and create a purpose-driven workspace.
Now, our physical office space adds a dynamic lever of working at Away and creates intentionality for how, where and why we work together. We heard directly from our people, both managers and employees, that they needed additional support with navigating our people programs in their everyday week. We rolled out People Partners in 2019 to support our teams and, as an extension, introduced the coaching platform Bravely, currently available to all our store managers and assistant store managers. We will be rolling this out to corporate employees soon. We have also introduced employee resource groups to ensure that we’re creating safe and inclusive spaces to support the communities within our organization.
At Grubhub, an online and mobile food-ordering and delivery marketplace, recruiters operate with a “people-first mentality,” according to Kelley Berlin, the company’s chief people officer. Instead of selling prospective hires on Grubhub’s massive scale — the company reaches more than 33 million diners — the pitch is always more personalized, with recruiters seeking to find out exactly how Grubhub can better serve each employee individually.
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
Our talent acquisition team provides every candidate with a personalized experience throughout their interview journey at Grubhub: taking time to grasp an individual’s skill set, identifying potential career opportunities and understanding what candidates are looking for in a company for their next role. We also showcase our cutting-edge work environment, which reflects the diversity of our customers and the communities we serve. We think like owners and innovate like entrepreneurs.
That is just a small part of how Grubhub operates with a people-first mentality. We offer our employees the complete package when it comes to their overall wellbeing, such as flexible time off, excellent health benefits, generous parental leave, tremendous learning and growth programs and opportunities to join our “culture crews” and employee resource groups.
Grubhub prides itself on offering unlimited vacation time for exempt employees.”
What are a couple of your key strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
I’m proud to say we have a wide variety of initiatives and programs that allows Grubhub to show how much we care for our employees both inside and outside of the organization. We encourage employees to focus on maintaining a work-life balance and taking time away from work to relax and recharge. Grubhub prides itself on offering unlimited vacation time for exempt employees, as well as a generous time off policy for non-exempt employees.
We also recently launched our new “Half-Day Friday” policy that allows employees to sign-off at 1:00 p.m. local time to begin their weekend early. Our learning and growth team constantly advocates for our employees to feel empowered as active participants in their own career growth. We provide continuous learning opportunities and training sessions, as well as a wide variety of coaching and mentorship programs. We want employees to know and explore possible career paths across Grubhub, as well as to be properly prepared for what’s next in their professional journey.
How has Grubhub adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last couple of years?
We have spent a lot of time listening to and learning from our employees as we navigated the last few years together. Obtaining this feedback was critical in helping us create better offerings and programs. To assist employees in both their work-from-home arrangements and their return to our offices, we’ve provided a monthly stipend to cover the costs of furnishing home office spaces, parking and commuting or anything else needed for them to excel — no matter what the work environment.
We’ve heavily leaned into our incredible #grublife culture team and found new ways to engage with our employees. With virtual workout and meditation classes, Slack raffles, guest speaker events, wing eating contests and more, there is always an opportunity to make a connection and create memories together. We care about giving our employees time away from work and supporting them in using time off in ways authentic and meaningful to them. We expanded the criteria for our floating holiday to foster a positive work-life integration here at Grubhub, whether it’s used for overall wellness, celebration of holidays, cultural events, civic engagement or community volunteering.
As a guest experience and retention platform for hospitality operators, SevenRooms is accustomed to delivering five-star service. That commitment to excellence extends to its view of employees as indispensable — and to the offerings it makes available to them as a result. “Our people are our key differentiator in the market,” said McCarthy. “The life they breathe into SevenRooms can’t be copied.”
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
From the moment a candidate begins their journey with us, our team is focused on developing a deeper, more human connection with them to set the tone for the culture we’ve built. We get to know them as a whole person – their interests, aspirations and experiences.
If they choose to work with us, employees take full advantage of Fresh Start and 7R&R, our global required time-off programs that honor our commitment to choice. They will see that we don’t just pay competitively; we pay well. We give our team the freedom and flexibility to continue choosing while at SevenRooms; where you work, when you work, and what you work on. They are not only a part of this team but true stakeholders, as every employee is given stock options and bonus capabilities. We’ve created an authentic culture dedicated to choice because this isn’t just a place where people come to work. It’s a place where people work together.
What are a couple of your key strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
We take a page from our product and strive to create an incredible, world-class experience for our employees throughout their journey at SevenRooms. We offer Roomie’s Choice monthly stipends to spend on whatever they want and a Taste of 7R quarterly dining credit, so they can have a night on the town on us. We also have unlimited PTO with mandatory consecutive day minimums and tenure milestone awards, as well as professional development and education support like biannual reviews and skills training. We do this to empower our team members to invest in themselves, take time for reflection and find balance in every aspect of their lives.
We’re seeing that people want the freedom to choose, to make their lives more meaningful.”
How has SevenRooms adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last couple of years?
The workforce has changed drastically alongside the immense shifts that the last few years created. We’re seeing that people want the freedom to choose, to make their lives more meaningful and to make the most of what precious time they have. At SevenRooms we feel that we know that — and that we’re doing something about it. For our employees, we’ve completely changed our working environment, shifting from office hubs to allowing everyone to work from anywhere. As a 100 percent remote workforce, our people can continue to choose to work closer to long-distance relatives, in their dream destination, or at home with the dogs. Rather than limiting them to the four walls of an office, all we want from them is to show us they can deliver outcomes and results from whatever place they choose.
We’ve also recognized just how important health is to all, and so we’ve implemented a number of programs to support the physical, mental and financial wellbeing of our team. SevenRooms provides Headspace, Carrot, One Medical, PetPlan, Aaptiv, gym reimbursement, short and long-term disability as well as comprehensive medical insurance.
Bubble aims to serve any and all startups and entrepreneurs beginning their journey to building a web application. Employees can expect a similarly nurturing, approachable atmosphere from the company’s culture, from generous benefits that have been reevaluated to embrace pandemic-era perks to regular “empowerment” sessions.
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
Bubble’s values include empowerment, kindness and genuineness, coupled with a commitment to diversity and inclusion. We’ve found that we stand out from other companies by articulating these values in public and putting them to practice in our company culture, starting first with our hiring process. For example, when hiring, we follow structured, standardized interview formats with defined scorecards, in order to reduce bias in the interviewing process. Bubble believes interviewing is a hard skill, and we invest in our interviewing team by having them shadow each other and give feedback. We train them in techniques for avoiding bias, and we also have a special interview round geared toward understanding a candidate beyond their resume, because we believe that people are more than just the professional skills they bring to work.
We believe that people are more than just the professional skills they bring to work.”
What are a couple of your key strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
We spearheaded a holistic re-evaluation of Bubble’s already generous employee benefits, equity and competitive salaries adjustments. We recently added new benefits, based on employee feedback. These benefits showcase Bubble’s commitment to our team's long-term personal growth as well as day-to-day holistic health, including 401(k) matching, a flexible monthly wellness stipend, a yearly learning and development stipend, and a six-week paid sabbatical every three years. And because we are a company that empowers and supports people to be proactive in culture building, Bubble team members also regularly run informal mentorship sessions for women and nonbinary employees, and empowerment sessions to support each other.
How has Bubble adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last couple of years?
Bubble has had a major shift from a New York-only office to a hybrid workforce with flexible and inclusive policies for employees across the country. These policies range from the financial to the cultural, from a new hire work-from-home stipend, to spend on home office improvements or technology for your workspace, to remote-inclusive team social events online once a month.
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