2021 Winner

Who is LEVER?

Lever is a leading Talent Acquisition Suite that makes it easy for talent teams to reach their hiring goals and to connect companies with top talent. Lever is the only platform that provides all talent acquisition leaders with complete ATS and robust CRM capabilities in one product, LeverTRM.

How do you encourage cross-functional collaboration in your organization?

Cross-functional empathy is actually one of Lever’s core values - so from Day 1 we’ve prioritized working cross-functionally within our organization. By having this as one of our values, this encourages Lever employees to work together with other teams for collaboration in our campaigns, upcoming product launches, events, and more, while respecting each other’s opinions, work loads, and other obligations.

We additionally have Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that are employee-led groups that hold events and drive awareness around specific observance days for their communities, giving employees another way to come together outside of typical work activities.

How do you improve leadership communication?

Lever is committed to transparency as the key to improving leadership communication. We use company-wide objectives and key results (OKRs) as a goal-setting framework, and make these OKRs visible to the whole company. We hold a company “All Hands” every other week in which we share progress and updates on these OKRs with the team and discuss additional company and team-specific updates to encourage transparency company-wide.

How is the employee experience affected by COVID-19 and how do you improve the employee experience?

So much of the employee experience has shifted alongside the shift to remote work. Employees are looking for additional support from companies that’s different from salary, commuter benefits, gym reimbursements, and at-work lunches.

One way we improved the employee experience during COVID was specifically through our benefits and perks offerings. Many HR teams re-evaluated their existing benefits program and questioned how they could restructure their program to ensure people felt cared for and supported given their unique circumstances. There were certain pivots most companies had to make to a remote work environment and had to ensure people had certain needs met, like internet reimbursement or work from home equipment reimbursement. At Lever, we wanted to better understand the unique needs each of our employees had in the past year, so we selected a randomized sample of people to meet for a listening tour to hear their various situations. This really took into account the special circumstances our employees had and what they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis. We also engaged with our ERGs during this process to get a full picture. This informed our complete benefits and perks overhaul plan, and we were able to adjust our benefits to meet these needs including ergonomic stipends, the WFH and internet reimbursement plans, a monthly stipend that helps cover babysitter, dog walkers, and grocery delivery fees. We additionally doubled down on healthcare and mental health resources for our employees. We ensured that every employee had access to virtual care and a stipend for accessing therapy, counseling, classes for stress reduction, and more.

We additionally spent time crafting virtual experiences for employees to stay connected like virtual movie viewing parties, additional social Slack channels, and a virtual retreat with optional local in-person activities (outdoors in accordance with local guidelines).

How do you measure your employee experience score?

We use a variety of metrics to determine our employee experience including employee retention, promotion rates, internal mobility metrics, and anecdotal feedback from our bi-annual employee listening tours.