Yelp is now almost 11 years old with more than 3,000 employees. Going from one room with a handful of employees and a precocious office puppy to eight global offices and departments with hundreds of employees is quite the change, and we wouldn’t have made it without fantastic employees steering the ship. Now when we recruit a candidate, we can show them the career path ahead of them and what it would be like to join our team. Thankfully, they seem to like what they see. We’re honored to announce that Yelp is one of Fortune’s 100 Best Workplaces for Millennials, a ranking determined by survey feedback from our employees.
Out of 465 companies reviewed by Great Place to Work, 315 companies reported survey results from at least 50 employees under age 35. Of those, Yelp ranked #41 based on survey feedback directly from the Millennials on our team.
Yelp employees demonstrating one of our values – Be Unboring! (Photo by Lee Klawans)
While we’re so proud to be recognized as a place Millennials love to work, our goal at Yelp is to be an inclusive workplace for all generations, and we understand that people have different preferences and needs. A good step to addressing those needs and creating a comfortable work environment is listening closely to what employees say they need. So instead of us talking about why Yelp is a great place to work, we thought it would be more interesting to hear from someone on the Yelp team who is living the Millennial dream.
Stephanie T., our director of support for Yelp Eat24 and a Millennial who’s been at Yelp for more than four years (previously as a product manager leading our international expansion team), shared her insight on four things that companies can do to motivate Millennials and why tech is the perfect industry for the Gen Y set on Medium. Here’s an excerpt:
1) Make work about me and I will make my life about work
Wikipedia calls Millennials a generation of “Me” workers, and it isn’t hard to see the technology industry as a perfect fit for us. Make your own schedule (I show up to work at the time that works for me). A workplace that caters its facilities to the individual (How good is your office’s onsite cafe?). Boundless opportunity to make a difference (In software, anything is possible!).
So I’ll say it: as a generation, we Millennials expect a lot. But we also give a lot! Keeping in touch with work email from one’s phone, connecting with colleagues through Facebook and taking your latest project home with you are regular practices, and natural habits, of many tech employees. Then you look around at the office and the kegs, coffee baristas and find yourself searching for bars in San Francisco as part of your job — and the lines between home life and work life suddenly look very blurry for many of us.
2) I want to feel like I am growing at the pace of my product
With its accessible tools and broad distribution channel, software lends itself very naturally to creating large, scalable output, quickly. The cycle of making mistakes, learning from them, and evolving one’s approaches and efforts can also happen very quickly. That’s the kind of iterative growth that used to take years of experience.
In San Francisco tech, staying at a job longer than a couple years (and sometimes months) is considered very long, and almost everyone gets started right after college. At Yelp, many of the more senior people I work with are in their twenties. It’s awesome to see that even without the age or tenure of those roles at more traditional industries, these individuals have been able to experience many of the same challenges and been able to grow accordingly.
Read the rest of Stephanie’s post on Medium, and see the full list of 100 Best Workplaces for Millennials on Fortune.com. We’re in good company!
