Author: admin

As we recently reviewed our team’s benefits, we asked our team what they liked about our current wellness benefits and culture. This is the first in a series of blog posts highlighting how our team thinks about our culture.  Here are the thoughts of the one and only Amanda Hoffer. 

What is one thing you love about SingleSprout?

I love the comradery we have at SingleSprout. From the top-down everyone is so supportive and pushes each other to be even better than yesterday. This bleeds into how the team supports one another on a personal and professional level. Regardless if it is a new activity outside of work someone has shared with the team or making a super impactful deal, we are always supporting each other as much as we possibly can. 

How does our remote environment benefit you?

The remote environment allows the flexibility I never thought I would have in my career. Currently, I am working from Tampa so I can see my mom and Nana for Mother’s Day. Having the ability to connect with my family that is far away and still work is a game-changer in terms of my WLB. I also love to travel so being able to tap into that side of myself while staying connected at work is something I am extremely grateful for. 

What other benefits make you excited about SingleSprout

I absolutely LOVE our Boon Coaching. We are fortunate enough to meet with a professional coach that works with each member of the team on almost any topic we want to cover. I personally work with a coach around professional development and management and she is absolutely wonderful. 

What do you do with your free time instead of commuting? 

I am able to tap into my love for Yoga during the time I would be commuting. It is one of my favorite ways to unwind after a long day and be mindful of my life.

Everyone has heard the debate over company culture remote work, and now everyone is talking about quiet quitting. We feel like these conversations are all a distraction from the real problem we have seen in the tech industry – employee burnout. In this new age of hybrid and remote work, it is harder to create the type of engagement and culture with one’s team. 

A couple of weeks ago we co-hosted an event with AllVoices. We had just the most incredible lineup of experts including Jasmine Francis, VP of People and Culture at Thinx, Celeste Bell EVP and Head of HR  at Deutsch NY,  Veracelle Vega, CPO at Boxed, and Adrienne Barnard SVP People Operations & Experience at Mainstay. They shared their insight on creating an intentional equitable hybrid/remote work environment. Below is a short list of action items your company can take, to improve engagement with your teams. 

• Over-communicate (same message(s) being sent on slack/email, etc, not just one format).
• Q&A’s to share market feedback and gather employee feedback (send guidelines beforehand).
• Internal newsletter end of the week that recognizes world, market, and business happenings.
• Share the risks (and upside 🙂 of joining your company with candidates interviewing.
• Employee-led conversations where employees can discuss a range of topics (ie. Well-being, water-cooler chatter, etc).
• Share what your company is doing to make the world a better place.

To listen to the who conversation, you can watch the webinar here. 

SingleSprout recently had the pleasure of partnering with G{Code} House in a virtual Zoom event to provide 1:1 mentorship and guidance for their alumni currently navigating their job search and a new career in tech.

G{Code} is an innovative, place-based initiative that connects women and non-binary people of color to educational and employment opportunities in the technology sector. The initiative combines affordable co-living, technology instruction, industry placements, and post-secondary education. They aim to tackle the STEM gender gap, income inequality, and the affordable housing crisis by recruiting Boston residents, specifically women and non-binary people of color, including those who are close to aging out of homeless shelters by offering them a place to live while pursuing a STEM education and ultimately providing participants with stable careers that will allow them to gain access to economic mobility.

Interested in learning more? Check out their programming here.

As our clients may already know, in order to conduct a non-bias search for talent, we do not ask for any demographic information. This is in order for us to place the best possible talent, without any bias. 

That being said, we were curious about the demographics of the talent that we have placed. We reached out to all the candidates we placed in the last 5 years to collect demographic data from the candidates we have placed. We had about 10% of our recently placed candidates respond to our survey. 

Here is what we found:

• 12.9% of our candidates identify as having a disability.
• 30.4% do not identify themselves as Heterosexual
• 32.4% do not identify themselves as a Cisgender man
• 46.4% do not identify as White, Caucasian, European

For more information, please check out all the results from the study here. 

But before we end this blog, we found a few fun facts that we would like to share. 

We asked our candidates to tell us the top 3 reasons why they accepted the offer from a SingleSprout company. 

• 73.9% accepted the offer because of the team/culture
• 53.6% were looking for remote options. 
• Only 43.5% listed Salary or benefits as the reason why they took the new role. 

And lastly… 

And 79.6% of candidates who answered this survey, are still at the company they joined while working with SingleSprout.

Our team has been working diligently over the last year on various projects, but we are most excited to share the update from our DEI committee. Please check out our 2021 DEI committee accomplishments below.

– Sponsored LifeLabs Learning (Inclusion, Belonging, and Feedback) for the entire team.
– Implemented Boon Health to offer 100% covered well-being coaching with expert coaches of diverse backgrounds.
– Instituted part of all-hands dedicated to Lessons (from leadership to IC’s to show making mistakes is OK and part of getting better). Everyone is encouraged and has an opportunity to talk about areas where they fell short and what they learned.
– Applying expertise from Rise Journey (DEI Consultant) and we brought on Jasmine Francis (Sr. Dir of People at Thinx) as an advisor for People/DEI/HR. Together we’re improving our DEI and people practices.
– Inclusivity training for hiring and managing for our managers.
– We’ve invested in RippleMatch to source and hire more candidates from diverse backgrounds (3 hires so far!).
– Established DEI committee, members, and meetings. We’ve focused on helping the community through volunteering (working on upcoming events with GCode, JusticeThroughCode, etc in ’22), updating our job descriptions and interview processes to be more inclusive, and upcoming surveying candidates we’ve placed over the last 4 years to understand their backgrounds and why they joined our clients).
– On social media, we helped bring awareness to tech-focused organizations dedicated to helping underserved communities (for-profit and non-profit) including BlackRemoteShe, Trevor Project, DevColor, VetsWhoCode, Sisterhood of NativeAmericanCoders, CharityWater, Play Like a Girl, JusticeThroughCode, The Anti-Defamation League, and more.

We are very proud of what we were able to accomplish this year but are just as excited about what we will be able to accomplish in 2022.