Glassdoor may hate us, but here’s why our employees love us
Just like you might look at Yelp reviews before trying a new restaurant, we understand that many candidates check out reviews about our business on places like Glassdoor, Indeed, Reddit, etc. We’ll be the first to admit that what’s out there isn’t good (like our Glassdoor rating for interviews is 70% negative 🙃). I could sit here and tell you it’s all bs, but it’s not. However, I don’t want to debate the legitimacy of the feedback from folks who didn’t get the job here. I’d rather spend the time sharing feedback from folks who actually work here.
“They just use the case studies for free labor”
Let’s briefly address the elephant in the room - case studies. Some of the reviews you may see will tell you that we do case studies as a way to source free labor to help us solve some of our challenging business problems. But the truth is all the problems we ask folks to solve through a case study are ones we have already solved (because how else can we grade the work if we don’t already know how the story ends). That said, we do use case studies to assess someone’s ability to communicate via writing. We are a globally distributed, remote-first company that does virtually all of its communicating through writing. Whether it’s a slack message, google document or company blog post, how you communicate your ideas and thoughts through writing is critical to your success here, so it’s also critical to how we assess candidates, and to how candidates assess us.
What actual Clipboard Health employees think about us
We collect feedback from team members here in several ways, with two of those being quarterly feedback surveys and stay interviews.
Quarterly feedback surveys - these are sent out to the entire organization and generally cover questions about overall sentiment towards the company, ask folks what we could be doing better, how well they see our values demonstrated in every day work, etc.
In our most recent survey, 95% of participants either Agreed or Strongly Agreed with the statement “I am proud to work for Clipboard Health”. 88% of participants would recommend Clipboard Health to friends or family as a great place to work. Some team member quotes:
“Being part of a company that embraces innovation, growth, and adapts to industry changes makes me feel like I’m contributing to something truly forward-thinking.“
“CBH has been an exceptional company to work for, and I continue to value my experience here. I have developed remarkable skills that I will carry with me throughout my career journey. I was challenged and pushed to reach my full potential.“
“[Working at Clipboard Health is] challenging and our product is addressing a real problem, both of which are things that I'm proud of.“
Stay interviews - our Head of People, Jesse Ferrigno, and People Ops Manager, Sarah Gray, regularly conduct stay interviews with folks across the org. Think of this like an exit interview, only we do it with folks still here. Our goal for these conversations are to understand how well people can align their work with our values (can they move unreasonably fast by getting access to the budget they need, for example), discover any recurring trends in the things that might cause people to leave (we literally ask people “If I had a time machine and told you a year from now you had chosen to exit the company, why do you think you would have left?”) and maintain a pulse on how well we are doing at not becoming too “corporate.” Some feedback from some recent stay interviews:
“The people at the top are really good to work with.” One of the things that keeps people here is the opportunity to work with very smart and talented people.
“The through-line of what’s kept me here is that I’ve continued to learn more here than I could anywhere else.”
“The number of really smart and impressive people I see working here across every function reinforces to me that the work we’re doing must be really important.”
“I love that I get to do truly interesting work everyday because there are just good problems to solve. As someone who gets bored easily, I’ve truly never gotten bored here.”
“I love how much ownership I get over my work. I’ve almost never been met with a “no”, so if something is interesting to me and I think it’s worth exploring, I can.”
We’ve still got a ways to go
Our hiring process is designed to find the most talented people, no matter where they live, what school they attended, what companies they worked at previously, etc. In many companies you might not have to do a case study or written exercise because of the school you attended, or you may get to skip an interview or two because you know someone who works there. We don’t do that, and as a result, that might be frustrating to some folks. Thus far, the process of having candidates complete a case study at the start of the hiring process has been our best method for sifting through thousands of applications to find the folks that best align with our values and expectations (we had 39,989 applicants across all roles in just the month of October). We unfortunately have to have a lot of people who applied, but did not get a job offer, and some people, a small percentage of people, can sometimes be disgruntled about that.
The decision on whether to apply or proceed with the hiring process is obviously yours and yours alone. We aren’t perfect and do regularly look at feedback from candidates on where we can improve (like a recent email from a candidate where we didn’t let them know whether they passed or failed the case study for 3 weeks). But we hope that by giving you some insight into why we’ve intentionally designed the hiring process to be what it is today, and how folks here perceive the business, we can help you make a more informed decision on if this could be the right place for you. We hope you’ll consider joining us!