There are 3 main ways we embrace flexibility.

At Indeed, we help companies around the world hire top talent, and are passionate about matching job seekers with the best opportunities. Given the many ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected where and how employees work, we quickly realized that having more flexibility not only increases productivity, but also happiness. That’s why we decided to offer three options for team members moving forward: in-office, flex, and remote.

In-Office

Anyone who lives within commuting distance from an Indeed office is eligible for the in-office option. They would come in 5 days a week and assigned a desk, with occasional work from home days permitted.

Flex

For team members who live within the metro area of an Indeed office, the flex option is available and it could be either scheduled or unscheduled. Depending on the department, employees may be required to be in the office (usually 1-4 days per week) on specific days, aka scheduled. Flex unscheduled engineers are similarly expected to be in the office 1-4 days per week (as determined by each organization and team), but these days might rotate and are not scheduled.

Fully Remote

While occasional visits to the office for collaboration or training may be required, fully remote employees will not be expected to regularly go into an office. Employment terms are specific to the city/state/province and country where the employee is hired. If you live somewhere Indeed does not have an office, you’ll automatically be under the fully remote category.

We also offer an annual $1,500 (USD) stipend for flex and remote employees to help cover expenses such as high-speed internet, utilities, snacks, office supplies, and even childcare. Ultimately, by offering more flexibility we’ll not only help cut down on our carbon footprint, but we’ll also be able to build the best product possible.

Render is a cloud platform built by software developers for software developers.

We’re solving a problem we’re intimately familiar with, giving our product and business a unique edge. Traditionally, when deploying applications in production, developers are forced to pick between two extremes: expensive yet simplistic platforms, or complicated, do-it-all-yourself services. Instead, Render takes care of all the laborious work upfront, minimizing the amount of thinking, reading, and clicking Render customers need to do. This makes it easy to get up and running quickly while simultaneously allowing applications to scale and increase in complexity over time, preventing a transition to DIY infrastructure. For example, during the height of the pandemic, many high-growth startups relied on Render to address rapidly changing business needs. We’re giving precious time back to our customers so they can focus on what really matters to their business.

We rely heavily on customer feedback and treat Render customers the way we'd like to be treated. We read every tweet, respond to questions from our community, and keep track of what our users need to be successful on Render. Moreover, all our full-stack engineers participate in both on-call and support engineering rotations. Customer service is core to UX and a big differentiator in a crowded market like ours.

We believe open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.

Automattic’s roots are open source. Several of our engineering teams actively contribute to open source and view it as part of our four freedoms. As our CEO Matt Mullenweg puts it, “Good ideas aren’t the sole province of groups of people behind high walls, and software shouldn’t be either.”

Of course, WordPress.org is the base of the software used to power WordPress.com. And WordPress.com is synced nearly daily with the WordPress trunk. An Automattic team works full-time on the open source publishing platform WordPress, and we make public our discussions about our work.

We contribute to a number of projects (also including WP for iOS, WP for Android, P2 Theme, BuddyPress, bbPress, WP Job Manager, and WordCamp US), making most of our work available via the GPL.

However, we also understand (thanks to our engineering team’s recent user study on tech hiring) that our open source commitment can be a double-edged sword for some candidates and employees. We recognize the time commitment and open source culture isn’t for everyone and, as Cate Huston, lead of the Developer Experience team wrote, “We’re considering how to improve our messaging on this important value for our company.”

Always learning is one of our core values.

We’re in the business of helping people learn and thrive. Andrew Grauer, co-founder and CEO of Course Hero, was a student at Cornell University and knew how hard it was to find study help that was specific to his classes. He determined there had to be a better way to leverage technology to learn, study efficiently, and do well in school. Thus, Course Hero was born. Course Hero is on a mission to help students graduate confident and prepared.

Sixteen years later, our online learning platform offers over 100 million course-specific study resources contributed by and for a community of students and educators, as well as 24/7 tutor help.

We know that life is multifaceted, and like our students, we aim to help our employees be confident and thrive both inside and outside of work. With the help of our $5,000 educational assistance and tuition reimbursement programs, employees have the opportunity to take continuing education classes and programs in their field. The stipend can be used to pursue additional degrees like an MBA or even certifications that will improve the overall value the employee brings to the team. The stipend can also cover fees for industry conferences where employees can learn from tech leaders and bring insights back to their teams. Last but not least, we organize hackathon events twice a year to empower teams to innovate and explore new approaches to technologies. Many of our successful product features have stemmed from hackathon projects!

It’s safe to say we are a group of passionate and curious problem solvers who believe in the importance of learning and are excited to help improve the student learning journey every day. If the idea of growing your career with a purpose-driven company piques your interest, let’s chat.

Our customers love us!

We often save companies $30,000 and 20-40 hours of time per leave. Our customers range in size (we currently work with companies such as Headspace, CircleCI, Figma, ClassPass, PopSugar, Webflow, and Pilot). We have a stellar Customer Net Promoter Score of 76 and 99% of our customers stay with us. 🙌

We’ve also been able to grow the business largely via word of mouth, which underscores the loyalty of our customers. Almost everyone has personally struggled with paid leave paperwork, or has had a friend or family member who has. Whether it’s paid family or medical leave, the process is torturous for both the individual and their employer. We set up an hour-long call with every new customer who signs with us in order to understand their current leave policies and process. We work to make sure their policies are inclusive and clear, and help them make changes if necessary. After the call, our customers have all of the tools they need to begin using the Sparrow dashboard right away.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, there was an uptick in both medical leaves and mental health leaves. Our customers looked to us to provide guidance during this time, and we’re proud to have been able to step up. We created a webinar to support our customers navigate these difficult times and helped many more people take necessary leave to take care of themselves. Ultimately, our customers (and really, their employees) are our first priority and we work hard every day to support them.

The process is the product.

We’re committed to bringing on the best talent and fostering employee growth internally. Yes, our postings are “jobs,” but we want them to be in the bigger landscape of a career. To that end, we’ll talk about performance plans as early as the interview and hiring process and be explicit in setting expectations.

Our feedback structures are designed to make sure we’re hearing from you regularly. In addition to stand-ups and weekly all-hands, you can expect weekly or biweekly 1-on-1s to ensure you’re tracking toward your personal and professional goals. More formal 360 reviews via Lattice also allow for feedback in all directions.

As co-founders, we (Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie) bring a vast amount of experience. Fouad worked on data infrastructure at Segment (he also has experience in recruiting) and Dan was the first non-Googler to manage a Kubernetes release. While our backgrounds are unique, both of us have worked at companies where we felt a lack of empowerment. We’re now determined to make sure that as Indent grows, not only is every employee able to participate, but they are also actively listened to with the same respect as a founder.

Trade-offs: We’d rather get policies in place for SOC 2 that enable us to build deeper trust with our customers than just race to tack on new features. We believe that sustainable progress is only possible through a sustainable process.