Pros
I've worked at Glassdoor for several years and the thing that really stands out for me is the people. Everyone has their heart in the right place - wanting to do the best for our users, our clients and internally for our people. People genuinely believe in the mission and the positive impact we can have on the world. The people are also smart and driven but understand the need for time for family and out of work activities. There is a lot of respect for your personal time and I think in general Glassdoor offers a good work life balance. I've also seen over the past few years the maturing of the company as it brings more structure (mostly for the better) to its operations. For instance, professionalizing planning with OKRs, salary benchmarking to ensure fair pay, well organized and thoughtful All Hands meetings, etc. I recognize that the company has been through a lot of changes in recent months, not least of which was the impact of Covid. The CEO and Board's decision to let go 30% of the workforce, while very painful at the time, was the correct and responsible thing to do. It ensured the business was set up for future success and that there would be no drip-feeding of redundancies. I can see that Christian (our CEO) is deeply considerate and does not take these kind of decisions lightly. He was dealt a very tough hand of cards in recent months and has responded with courage and compassion. He feels the weight of his responsibilities and this comes through in the extent to which he makes himself vulnerable and transparent. For a tech/product standpoint, I personally am very excited by the new strategy direction and believe we will have a lot of impactful and innovative products to bring to market. Overall Glassdoor is a great employer and I would highly recommend it!
Cons
Every company has its cons and Glassdoor is not an exception. I think there are a few key areas that Glassdoor could improve: - Sense of urgency: I think some areas of the org are strongly professionalized and the people act with urgency. Whereas with others it seems that follow up emails are sometimes necessary to solicit a response. This is just an example, but at times there is a 'big company' mentality whereas I believe we could have more of a startup, get stuff done approach (even if it means we mess up sometimes - better to move fast then get bogged down with bureaucracy). - Meeting overload: sometimes what could be achieved in a well structured email is repackaged as a meeting. I would encourage us to set the bar higher before booking the time of colleagues. This isn't a big issue but you do see meetings occurring that would have been better served through an email.