Building a More Inclusive Yelp

For the fifth year in a row, Yelp is publicly sharing its gender and ethnic diversity data. Like other companies, we know we still have a long way to go to get where we want to be, but we’re happy with our progress and our commitment to making Yelp more diverse, more inclusive, and yes, a better place. You can find our EEO-1 data at the bottom of this post.  

We’ve recently taken on some exciting new diversity initiatives. We retooled our recruitment process for Yelp’s Sales Leadership Development Program to encourage and foster more diverse applicants. This program serves as a pipeline from our 3,000+ person salesforce into management. Given that the sales department represents more than half of our workforce, this is an opportunity to have a real, wide-ranging impact, and the results are starting to show. This year we’ve seen our most diverse pool of applicants and most diverse class ever into this management training program.

We also continue to focus a lot of our effort on initiatives that promote inclusion. As we explained in a prior blog post: “Studies have shown that increasing diversity without increasing inclusiveness actually negates the positive effects of diversity.” We want people to feel as comfortable at work as they are when they’re surrounded by their friends and family at home (while still being productive!). That’s good for Yelp and our employees alike.   

For example, our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) continue to nurture and foster a sense of belonging throughout the organization. Since 2017, they hosted more than 550 events across the company, including a screening of “being ñ” with Project ñ and celebrating black-owned businesses during Black History Month.

Yelp’s Awesome Women in Engineering took Yelp’s Hackathon to new levels this year by creating a book to share their paths to the tech world, and our Engineering ERGs also partnered with groups throughout the year like Bay Area Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, National Society of Black Engineers, Code Tenderloin and Enterprise for Youth.

In short, we’re proud of the programming and conversations our employees are facilitating through our ERGs, and are excited by our latest diversity initiatives to promote diversity in Yelp’s sales leadership. There’s more to come, and we look forward to sharing more about what’s working and what isn’t.