If you’re ready to find your dream job you landed on the right page. Meet the people who are connecting women to great places to work.
How often have you tried and failed to find your dream job stepping instead into another organization ill prepared to nurture your potential? The truth is that until fairly recently, it wasn’t that easy to know enough about a company’s culture before you signed up for the position. Much harder to figure out how committed to a woman’s career trajectory it was. But Fairygodboss is changing that with a marketplace where professional women looking for jobs, career advice and the inside scoop on companies meet employers who believe in gender equality.
Today we talk to Georgene Huang, Fairygodboss’s CEO and co-founder, a leader obsessed with improving the workplace for women. A graduate of Cornell and Stanford Universities, Georgene ran the enterprise business at Dow Jones and was a Managing Director at Bloomberg Ventures before co-founding her new venture.
RSM— For a large part of your career you worked for large organizations. What prompted you to start Fairygodboss?
Georgene Huang (GH) —Fairygodboss was born from a personal experience I had while job searching and two months pregnant. I was in an executive role, looking for a job and not telling people in my interviews that I was pregnant. I wanted to ask about maternity leave policies, how much face time a company required, how flexible it was in terms of working hours and whether there were women and other mothers in senior management. I felt that asking these questions outright was taboo in 2015 and is still taboo in 2017. It meant risking negative judgments of myself even though I was — and remain — incredibly career oriented.
Fairygodboss is a safe place where women can hear from other women about their job and workplace experiences and ask questions of each other without worrying about judgment. You may get different opinions from women on Fairygodboss but everyone will give it to you straight.
How hard is it to find your dream job?
RSM— What makes it challenging if you are a woman to find your dream job?
GH— Women still face an unequal playing field for a number of social and cultural reasons even at the most egalitarian and inclusive of companies. Women in our society tend to bear the brunt of caretaking (whether for children, relatives or parents.) As a result, many women tend to have more to juggle in their lives beyond work and if you find a dream job, it often comes with demands that you are always on, always present and available. This is completely compatible with caretaking if the company allows you to be flexible and has a supportive culture and policies — but it can be hard to figure this out in advance.
A great read on best ways to find a job by Susan Landon.
RSM— How exactly does Fairygodboss help women find their dream jobs?
GH— Everyone’s dream job looks slightly different. Some want the corner office and executive role while for others, a dream job is simply one where their work-life balance, vacations and paid time off are respected, and they are paid and promoted fairly at the same time. We don’t assume any individual woman wants the same thing as another woman, which is why our platform let’s women’s individual voices speak for themselves. Fairygodboss’ role is to let women’s opinions help other women figure out whether a job, department or company is the right employer for them.
RSM— What are some of the most candid insights women share about their workplaces on your site that they don’t on others?
GH— A small group of women bravely discuss sensitive and personal topics such as sexual harassment experiences or learning about being paid unequally to men doing similar work (or even that report to them.) Some of them will share what their manager or HR did in response to complaints about these things. Thankfully this is a minority of women in our community. Most seem to hold and share balanced views about things their employers are getting right and areas where they could improve. A lot of women also tend to weigh in their salaries, work-life balance, flexibility, the promotion track for women and whether there is a good maternity leave policy. We’ve created crowd-sourced databases around each of these topics as a result.
RSM— Your website offers inside scoops on pay, benefits and culture. Is all this information posted by individual users or do you gather independent info as well?
GH— Almost all of the information on our site about pay, benefits and culture comes from female employees’ mouths, directly. The only places that are an exception to this are official company profiles (labeled clearly as such) where employers that Fairygodboss partners with elect to share that information from their point of view.
RSM— As a woman, what should you look at when evaluating an organization where you might find your dream job?
GH— You should do all your homework. Use Fairygodboss to read what other women say, and to connect with women who work at a company (you can message women anonymously in our community if you sign up and leave a job review yourself.) However, don’t just stop there if you’re seriously trying to find your dream job. Talk to people in your personal network, ask them to introduce you to others who’ve worked there and read everything you can about the company even from an editorial, news or social media perspective. Try to see if what you hear and read is relatively consistent across different sources to get at the truth of what it’s like to work somewhere.
RSM— Do you see real efforts being made by organizations towards attracting and retaining more women? What are some of those efforts you’ve seen?
GH— Yes, absolutely. Our mission at Fairygodboss is to improve the workplace for women. We do this by creating transparency and highlighting best practices at employers, so obviously we have learned about some amazing programs employers are using to attract and retain women. Women share openly with us what they think works and employers tend to ask us what other employers do, as well.
We’ve heard that mentorship and sponsorship programs are incredibly important to individual women. Women care a lot about the ability to have and take maternity leave — and think its important their companies also offer gender neutral benefits so that the probability of taking a full, extended parental leave is not stigmatizing. Flexibility and flexible working policies that are official (as opposed to case-by-case depending on your manager) are also viewed as very important by women who have care-taking responsibilities or strong outside work interests. Any employer who has been brave enough to tackle the issue of equal pay and correcting any discrepancies in this area (e.g. Salesforce and their pay gap audit) are also seen to be taking real action to improve gender quality.
Great piece on how to prepare for a job interview by Lily Benjamin
RSM— Your site is a job board as well. Do companies review resumes submitted on line? Any suggestions on how to use the job board to maximize the potential to find your dream job?
GH— Yes we list jobs from companies who are our partners — by definition, they are companies that are committed to transparency and gender equality. Our partners connect their job listings to our site and every company’s application process is unique, but in general requires a resume to be submitted to them. You can always send an email to us at info@fairygodboss.com if you don’t see a job opportunity that you’re interested in but want us to keep an eye out for you. Next year, we’ll be starting to match candidates and employers based on profiles that users may create with us, so keep an eye out for that!
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