5y
Thank you for sharing your experience. Your view is certainly not what we want for Proxyclick, and our leadership team takes your feedback seriously .
We are big believers that Glassdoor is an important way for future Proxyclickers to evaluate whether or not we are the company for them, and we have always supported honest fair reviews. In that spirit, we’d like to highlight a few facts related to your comments:
- Here is what we mean by merit based hiring: this year we have implemented a competence framework that makes expectations as explicit as possible across our company. This is the basis for recruitment, development and evaluation. We have a quarterly talent review where managers discuss the performance and development of their people- this has no scores, but is a significant investment of time to know our people and to ensure they get feedback. We proactively run compensation reviews and have formal promotion windows to ensure fairness. We have a benchmarked salary framework that ensures we pay fairly according to market and to talent. We have trained all our hiring managers in interviewing skills, including the impact of unconscious bias. Asking a candidate to complete an assignment as part of their recruitment is a best practice to remove bias. It is true, much of this is still a relatively new framework but our commitment to it is real, precisely because we want to avoid the perception that you describe. Our current ENPS is 46, placing us in the top 25% of our industry.
- With respect to diversity and inclusion, these are the numbers: 25% of our senior management is female, 25% are LGBTQIA, and 38% are people of color. We have an international leadership team. Our numbers are in line or stronger than many tech companies internationally, and relative to Belgian standards we outperform the benchmark. We also are now into or 2nd quarter of our DEI initiative where our team engages with topics of diversity equity and inclusion. We’ve had international level guest speakers, run a diversity audit, held a series of round tables where over 40% of the company took part. This past year we have learned a lot, it was a growth opportunity for us all and we thank those who challenged us and made us better.
- We strive for transparency and this means not just telling people what they want to hear but what needs to be heard. For us that is what our value 'one team' means, trusting our people to show maturity and judgement towards our business and their relationships. True, sometimes those messages are tough and candid. But we encourage people to reach out if things are not clear or ring false. This year, our People team ran over 400 individual 1:1s for a team of 81 people to help keep that door open. These meetings are candid for both sides and require vulnerability from both sides, but this helps bridge culture so we get stronger as we grow.
- Last, responding to the suggestion we have been irresponsible with COVID-19. We made remote work mandatory early in the crisis and have not mandated any return to the office. We also invested in an external consultant to ensure our premises was health and safety approved. We were asked by our people to open our office because they wanted to come back. We did encourage people to remember how important real connection was and were thrilled in the summer to see people under a limited strict capacity limit. We have never mandated a return, even when that was the spirit of many companies- rather we held a series of honest roundtables to discuss these meaningful topics. What is more, we’ve enabled people maximum flexibility to connect with their families and manage their wellbeing even if it meant working abroad. We have had 2 cases of Covid-19 and were able to quickly within 24hours contract trace to all those potentially exposed with no spread. We leverage our VMS product where it can help and are proud of our recent product People Flow in facilitating a safe return to work. But we are even more proud of how much our team has collectively come together to deliver this so quickly.
Our intention in responding is not to challenge your experience, which we wish had been otherwise. You have the right to share your perspective and we’ll take what lessons we can. Indeed, you’ve given us an opportunity to critically reflect, and in so doing we feel it is necessary to ensure there is a balanced picture of our practices so that potential future team members can judge for themselves the positive potential of Proxyclick and its leadership.
We wish you the best in your future endeavors.
Gregory Blondeau, CEO Proxyclick
