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Josh Goldstein

Underdog.io Workplaces - Unsponsored documentary profiles of business and culture

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Our goal with this product is to build a cultural information resource for job seekers and to help readers gain an awareness of the type of people, culture, and values that they’d like to have in their workplace.

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Brett Langdon
Thank you! This is such a great series of posts.
Kate Zasada

:) .

Pros:

Love the outside perspective on a company-- so helpful when evaluating the culture!

Cons:

Are you concerned about companies being unwilling to work with you based on a negative take you share?

Taylor Crane
Awesome job team! Curious, are you looking to take this in a journalistic direction, where the coverage may positively or negatively reflect on the company, or are you more focused on highlighting the positives of different cultures so job seekers can find what interests them the most? I expect the latter, but the former is pretty interesting too.
Toby Shorin
Maker
@taykcrane Thanks for the question! We are not interested in merely writing fluffy PR pieces, as there are indeed already businesses that companies can pay to write that sort of material, and the result is neither interesting nor helpful to job seekers. At the same time, we're not out to write hit pieces on any of our customers, who I'll mention do *not* pay for this service, and whose best interest we obviously have in mind. Our perspective is this: 1. We've already done a first-round selection filter on the companies we choose to feature, and our curation says a lot about the type of companies we think are high quality. 2. It's not up to us to make the company look extra good. If the company doesn't have a particularly diverse team or they have a workaholic culture, we are neither going to hide that nor point it out explicitly as something to stay away from. We are capable of providing a lot of rich cultural information with these pieces, and we trust that our readers will be able to pick up on that and make judgments for themselves about the type of place they're interested in working at. Do you think it works? Love to hear your feedback!
Taylor Crane
@tobyshorin That makes sense and sounds like a cool approach. I'm looking forward to reading about how different companies approach culture, particularly successful companies. One suggestion, try and call BS on culture practices that aren't actually followed at the company and are just used to attract new hires. There's way too many of them. Interviewing current employees could be one way to achieve that.