Great Place to Work with Some Big Challenges
Pros
I can't wait to get to work everyday at Glassdoor. It's an environment full of passion, great energy, and smart people. Great cultural leader - the CEO sets the tone of working hard, humbleness, listening to all points of view, and solving problems together. He's created a very special company. Exciting business - we're disrupting and making the world a better place everyday - it's a mission that everyone at the company deeply cares about. Flexibility - everyone works hard, but there's a lot of tolerance for getting your work done on your own schedule, working outside of office hours, etc. Strong Consumer and B2B businesses - great leadership and employees have made this company successful. Strong performance - continuous performance above target in most areas makes riding on this train extremely gratifying. Scrappy teams that "find a way" to get it done.
Cons
Despite all the amazing "pros", several fairly serious challenges have developed recently due to company's roots and massive growth year over year that need to be addressed. This is a very detailed list, because I care. I love this company and I want it to continue to be great. I would like our leadership to tackle these problems: 1. We work in a two-sided marketplace, and unfortunately, there's a big divide between the teams as well. The company originated on the consumer side, and most of the founders and people able to influence strategy and product innovation place the priority on the consumer side of the business. This makes it challenging to get resources and product improvements to improve the employer experience with our product. 2. It's sometimes unclear how and why product decisions get made, and although people can freely give their input to the product team, it's unclear how the work is prioritized, when things will be delivered, etc. It feels like the product roadmap should be born from a clear company and product strategy, but it feels like a handful of people are making the decisions based on their opinions, with lack of serious consideration of input from internal or external customers. Some of this may be due to a lack of product or engineering resources - but it's definitely a struggle to get engineering resources on anything outside of what product leaders have planned, which is causing us to ignore many innovative ideas with high revenue potential. 3. We're unfortunately developing a culture where you have to work hard to get resources because so many resources are cross-functional. The cross functional resources aren't working, because individuals make decisions on what they are going to work on rather than those decisions being made based on a clear strategy from the top. 4. We need to drink our own champagne when it comes to our culture. In the time I've been at the company, there's been little mention of our culture. We have amazing values stemming from our CEO, but we need to take advantage of those and get everyone on board - especially some of our top leaders who aren't always behaving in ways that align with the core cultural values that Robert believes in for the company. 5. Our strategy from the top is very detailed on the consumer side, but it often feels like our employer business strategy is a line item. I'd like to see everyone in senior management put as much thought into the employer strategy and take the initiative to get to know that business and its customers much better. 6. When entering new businesses or launching new products, we often don't put the strategic horsepower, resources, or dollars behind them. High expectations are set for revenue without the supporting resources or plan, creating a situation where it's difficult to deliver and teams continuously feel like their failing until the product is developed to the point where it provides true value. I'd like to see us define what will make a product and go-to-market strategy successful and get a significant portion of that done before we hold people to revenue targets.