Patti Lew

1. There are a number of foundational research reports and insights you can provide to your product partners before they delve into the development process. These include: 1. A broader overview of the competitive landscape and market landscape 2. As well as a closer look at the health of your brand and how it fares against it competitors over time through brand trackers and CSAT (consumer satisfaction) surveys 3. In terms of users and target audience, they can draw on segmentation and persona research 4. And I find that my product partners greatly appreciate and rely on value proposition research to frame their design decisions and utilize messaging insights to better frame the end product to our users. 2. In terms of how we present these insights, we find it helps to give a preview to Product leaders first to clear up questions or reframe as needed given their feedback so they can become early supporters and proponents of the research. Also, when sharing out more widely to the product org, as calendars can be hard to manage, I find it easier to be added on as an agenda item on a recurring Product team meeting, as most of the team will be in attendance. Another way we are currently experimenting with having Product partners ingest and internalize insights at Glassdoor are through immersion workshops. This allows them to digest insights we currently have before developing new hypotheses, like incorporating new segmentation research. In this case, we can develop a shared understanding of the unmet user needs, break down the jobs to be done and identify user pain points of our target audience.

1. Ideally you would draw on both a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to shape your segmentation research. Start with a hypothesis of who your TAM (total addressable market) is. This will help you to identify new market segments you may not have thought to target. For example, for Glassdoor our TAM is comprised of all working age adults who are either currently employed or want to be employed. Segmentation can then be used to expand the sandbox (market) that you’re playing in by expanding your current definition of who your true audience is - so you can see which segments present the best opportunity, the ones who are most valuable (i.e. highly engaged, monetizable) and/or the ones with the most growth potential who you can more easily convert. 2. To obtain a more forward leaning segmentation that is more long lasting, segment on audience wants, needs and attitudes as opposed to current behaviors which can constrain you as market and social conditions change. 3. Bonnie Chiurazzi’s Pro Tip: Take the time to really identify what is the problem, pain point(s), and action to take. This is critical. As Einstein quotes: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Screen respondents on behaviors, attitudes, wants and needs to see who is included in your segmentation. Don’t limit yourself to very specific personas. For example, in the area of employer branding, Bonnie screened respondents on the responsibilities they held, not their job title as different roles across the company have differing responsibilities at various companies. This greatly increased the number of people she was able to gather insights from. If Bonnie had screened by job title, she would have only had a small handful of Employer Branding professionals to draw insights from. But by widening the net, she was able to include respondents both in talent acquisition and in marketing roles who had Employer Branding responsibilities.

Market shifts cannot be ignored, otherwise you will be left behind and will no longer be relevant. In the last two and a half years, we’ve all seen significant changes in the market given global events and cultural shifts on a number of fronts especially in terms of the pandemic and for social justice. Within a month of covid shutting down the US, Glassdoor quickly created a Covid-19 Response Campaign that offered a slew of resources and tips for job seekers from directing them to companies who were surge hiring and work from home jobs to offering a collection of blog tips and a webinar on how to find a job during that challenging time. In the aftermath of George Floyd, DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) is now a focus for many companies; the top hiring priority for companies is now Diversity & Inclusion according to a Lighthouse research study in 2022. With the ongoing civil unrest during the summer of 2020 and calls for righting systemic injustice, Glassdoor immediately chose to proactively meet this critical cultural moment and the needs of those who do not have a voice. Glassdoor made a public commitment to leverage its product and resources to help achieve equity in the workplace. We spun up a DEI Product task force to create products and features that help underrepresented and traditionally marginalized job seekers learn how people like them experience the culture at companies of interest, so we can shine a light on inequities and hold companies accountable. On the other side of the coin, employers are now able to highlight their DEI efforts and make statements in how they want to reach their DEI goals (i.e. increase women representation among senior leadership to 50% by 2025, increase Black employee representation to 8% in 2025). Learn more on Glassdoor’s initial DEI efforts here and our expansion of DEI features the following year. In relation to this, pay equity has been a growing issue highlighted both in social media and the growing number of states that have enacted equal pay laws, acts or statutes. Therefore, Glassdoor has obsessively focused on delivering a much more comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-digest view of a person’s total pay potential by investing in an advanced AI driven machine learning model. Along with that, we created features where job seekers and employees can see salaries broken down by gender and race/ethnicity to see where there are inequities in pay. We then generated campaigns around Equal Pay day to highlight these products and our core belief that everyone deserves to be paid fairly, and to get there, we need salary transparency to create more equality. The brief for our fall 2021 brand campaign also took into account the forces that were affecting the market. We chose to focus on those who were most affected by covid and the job market - women of color with children, with our ads telling a compelling story of one of these moms and how Glassdoor could help them find a job they love. The campaign resulted in a significant increase in both awareness and consideration. We also have a stellar Glassdoor Economic Research team that provides timely insights and research on today’s labor market by unearthing important trends in hiring, pay and the broader economy. They take current market forces into account and have released recent studies on parents return to the workforce, hybrid work, changes for Gen Z employees returning to the workforce, and a pay equity analysis. Much of their work is picked up in the press and media, positioning Glassdoor as thought leaders in this space. Bonnie’s pro tip: Get the most out of your research by using it to advance your organization’s thought leadership within your industry. If your perspective shifted after learning something, chances are that you’re not the only one who would benefit from that knowledge. For an example of thought leadership research, check out Glassdoor’s Employer Branding Report.