Focus more on transparency in careers pages

[jamesefhawkins]

I'd estimate 80% of candidates I interview cite transparency as a big reason to move to PostHog.

Perhaps we should call this out more as its own dedicated section on the careers page.

I could see ie:

"We are the most transparent company you will ever work for."

Then justification - highlighting some of the unusually transparent things:

• Transparent pay
• Shared board meeting decks
• Shared financial performance
• Fundraising transparency
• Transparent reviews (... this isn't there yet, but we're about to do this)
• Everyone : everyone else 360 review sessions

We could also talk about why transparency matters:

• Builds trust - means we always try our best to do the right thing
• Inclusive - anyone can step on toes
• Educates - it's the only way to learn from everything we're doing at PostHog - good stuff or mistakes
• New people - get up to speed much faster
• Creates a community - we're building a huge open source community, it's part of this

@corywatilo, this is something that @eltjehelene spoke to me about yesterday. Not super urgent, but felt we could upgrade our careers experience like this :) FYI @piemets

[charlescook-ph]

• Transparent pay

We should word this more precisely - we are not 100% transparent on pay as we don't publish salary information externally or internally. Not saying that we should, but a very small number of companies do publish this kind of stuff.

I would frame it as 'transparency about exactly how we calculate pay'.

Very excited about this!

[joethreepwood]

Adding another example of a company which has spoken about pay transparency: Pollen, where I used to work, did this and I worked on some of the comms around it. Was fantastic for building their employer brand and gathering publicity, but is quite distinct from PH's approach.
https://pollen.co/blog/why-we-went-pay-transparent

[lottiecoxon]

I vote we change the 'our culture' section to 'our culture of transparency' - absorbing the previous culture section of 'all remote', 'diversity' and 'written communication' into this. This would bring the focus to transparency without leaving out the other aspects of culture. Though this means rewriting some content for this section. I can try it but I'm not known for my strength in copy writing. I'll have a crack at this now and post what I come up with

[lottiecoxon]

Super rough start to this what do people think? -

[joethreepwood]

I like it -- there are a few places I can see we could tighten in up and make it clearer from a copy/positioning POV. Happy to spend some time on this tomorrow if helpful?

…

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 4:37 PM lottiecoxon ***@***.***> wrote: Super rough start to this what do people think? - [image: careers] <https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/65415371/119855379-c2475e00-bf09-11eb-8d0d-dcc3b34c92d7.png> — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1416 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AUA6UKNN6RXWA7LYDPGEVQ3TPZRMZANCNFSM45UFKR7A> .

[eltjehelene]

I like it -- there are a few places I can see we could tighten in up and make it clearer from a copy/positioning POV. Happy to spend some time on this tomorrow if helpful?

I'd love to steal that for our job descriptions as well

[joethreepwood]

Absolutely. Just let me know if there are particular ones you'd like me to look at?

…

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 6:09 PM eltjehelene ***@***.***> wrote: I like it -- there are a few places I can see we could tighten in up and make it clearer from a copy/positioning POV. Happy to spend some time on this tomorrow if helpful? I'd love to steal that for our job descriptions as well — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1416 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AUA6UKMYPK2AUA3F2CE3AXLTPZ4F3ANCNFSM45UFKR7A> .

[joethreepwood]

I'm not the best at mocking up pages and doubt I'd be able to improve on Lottie's work, so I've thrown the copy into a Google doc here.

[joethreepwood]

I've updated the copy after some quick feedback.

Building this into the Careers page is beyond me though as it's built in React (and even with a bit of help from Karl!).

@corywatilo Would you be able to build this copy into the page? Let me know if you need me to raise it as a separate issue, etc. Once the layout is built in then I can tweak the copy further if needed.

[lottiecoxon]

Icons created for this to fit the style of the current website

[charlescook-ph]

Icons created for this to fit the style of the current website

I like these a lot except for the 'fundraising transparency' one - maybe because it's more hearts and dollar signs which you've already used? Gives me a 'we love money' vibe.

I guess there are only so many ways you can graphically represent transparency...

Separately @joethreepwood for the fundraising transparency text, could we go further and say something like 'We keep our team informed of the latest fundraising conversations that are in progress.'? It's a bit more meaningful than just informing people when the next benchmark has been hit - the meaningful bit is things like James sharing earlier conversations as they happen and getting team feedback on them.

[joethreepwood]

Yep, good call. I've updated the copy and, with some fresh eyes, tweaked the lengths and sentence constructions a little so it should read easier and flow better on a page too.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IKSQ0NluoD6J_--aE297MqJ4QR5Ws3g8c0Bjp7Tuuok/edit?usp=sharing

[corywatilo]

This is built out based on the copy in the Gdoc above and is in the PR above.

[joethreepwood]

Looks great, thanks Cory!