Top Companies Still Hiring — EverQuote
Today’s Top Companies *Still* Hiring article spotlights EverQuote! Like each company featured here, not only are they still actively hiring but they have not undergone any layoffs. EverQuote’s vision is to make finding the right insurance easy and transparent. In doing so, they’re simultaneously innovating a $146B industry.
Thank you to Chief People Officer, Elyse (Tyson) Neumeier as well as Senior People Operations Associate, Abbey Cohn for not only your insights into working at EverQuote, but the contagious excitement you brought to the crafting of this piece. To see which roles EverQuote is hiring for, please visit their Careers Page. They have a number of openings that are remote, in Cambridge, MA and in Seattle, WA.
To learn how they’re navigating COVID-19 and why they’re a team worth joining, keep on reading!
COVID-19 has placed a spotlight on the importance of life and health insurance. Given that EverQuote offers an insurance marketplace, you have played a critical role in providing access to people’s insurance needs. How has that looked over the past few months?
EverQuote’s vision is to empower customers to better protect life’s most important assets- their families, property, and future. Right now, arguably more than ever, people need good insurance, and they don’t want to have to spend a lot to have it. We’re proud to play a role in helping millions of consumers protect their most important assets (including their health), while also helping them save money. In addition, many of the insurance agents we’re partnered with are small business owners. It has been incredibly rewarding to help provide them support and stability during a pretty tumultuous time. We strive to be a people-first organization, and that extends to our consumers and customers as well as our employees.
In the face of the unprecedented Covid-19 virus, EverQuote has taken all necessary measures to protect our employees, customers, and communities while also maintaining focus on our mission to serve as the leading insurance marketplace. This time has largely been business as usual, for which we feel very fortunate.
What have you been doing to keep your employees engaged and feeling supported during this time?
We’re incredibly grateful for the ways in which our team has pulled together to keep everything moving during this very difficult time. We have employees dealing with sick relatives, unemployed spouses, and no childcare. The team has moved mountains to ensure that we’re still operating on all cylinders and that their teammates feel supported. While we continue to invest in top down support mechanisms, it has been incredible to see the colleague-to-colleague support that has emerged.
We’ve transitioned most of our normal in-office perks to opportunities to give back to our local community. For example, our Tuesday catered lunch budget is now donated each week to organizations like the Greater Boston Food Bank, Habitat for Humanity and Read to a Child, as well as to the restaurants we would have normally ordered from. We also have been running a themed “quarantine contest” each week to showcase our employees’ creative sides. Past themes have included best breakfast, most impressive collection, best dessert and most effective paper airplane. Employees submit photos, and the winner gets to donate $100 to the charity of their choice.
Connection is hard when you are interacting solely through a screen. To recreate some of the non-work related connections we normally have in the office, we created an EQ Fun Calendar. These virtual events have included social events like cooking classes and yoga, but also learning and development opportunities, including financial planning 101 and ‘ how to craft an effective sales pitch’ from one of our sales leaders. We have also invested more heavily in support for mental health: Headspace is now a benefit offered to all employees, and we have expanded tools for accessing mental health providers.
Connection has also come in the form of weekly, all-company town halls that started the very first week we went home. Turnout and feedback for these sessions has been incredibly strong and positive, with almost the entire company regularly joining from around the world. The Town Halls have dramatically increased the number — and caliber — of internal conversations we’re having around our core business model, product launches, and organizational evolutions. They also bring to life each employee’s personal impact on the business and how our complex organization works together. The Zoom chat bar during the meeting is an amazing manifestation of our culture: it’s a steady outpouring of love, support and corny humor that is so deeply EverQuote. In fact, our CEO is one of the most vocal people in the chat. And lastly, the highlight of these sessions is the weekly musical performance from one of our Business Consultants, Todd Badolato. These have ranged from Miley Cyrus to Frank Sinatra, all performed on either his ukelele, guitar or didgeridoo. Family members and kids often join in to enjoy the music, and we all enter the weekend with so much energy.
Core to EQ is that we try to take an ‘outside the box’ mentality to People Operations. Much of what we have provided to employees since going remote has been a result of listening to individual employees, understanding their particular needs and leading with empathy. Our mission is to figure out how to say ‘yes’ to requests to help employees achieve better productivity and well-being during these challenging times.
EverQuote is invigorated by the future of remote employment and a revamped use for office space. You mentioned that you see this as an opportunity to help craft the evolution of the way employees work moving forward. What has been your experience with this thus far, and what are your predictions?
Covid-19 might be the single biggest disruption to the way people work since the advent of the personal computer. The way that work will be done for the next 10 years will be dramatically different from how it has been done for the past 30, and we are in the driver’s seat for shaping this evolution. We have taken a fairly aggressive approach to being “permanently flexible”. We’re still defining exactly what that looks like, but what we do know is we will not return to an office where everyone has a desk and is expected to come in 5 days a week. We will most likely use the office primarily as a collaboration space moving forward and ensure that people continue to have the flexibility to do individual work from home.
The last 3 months of remote work have reinforced that trust is essential for effective collaboration. The EQ team consistently demonstrates just how much can be accomplished when you trust your people, assume positive intent and get out of their way, but we’ve been more intentional about encouraging and promoting that approach since we began working remotely. Our performance metrics are built to reinforce the importance of measuring output versus activity, and we now regularly reinforce that it isn’t about how/when/where the work gets done (unless people are overworking themselves, in which case we do want to intervene!), but the impact the work has on achieving our business goals.
It’s worth noting that many employees continue to be effective contributors on their teams while simultaneously looking after our children and other loved ones. We are proactively exploring ways to support those individuals and ensure they do not burn out. Working full time while caring for others full time is like training for a marathon with a weighted backpack — it’ll be incredible to retain some of that learned efficiency and velocity even after we return to normal, but we also need to be extra careful not to injure ourselves along the way.
You mentioned how “Gratitude Bombs” have become more and more prevalent since EverQuote adjusted to remote working. They have served as a source of hope and happiness during a time when so much feels out of our control. Could you share a bit more about what this has looked like?
We have witnessed a tremendous outpouring of support for one another during this time, particularly for the people who need it most. Sometimes this looks like teams supporting their colleagues who are caring for children or a sick relative by reconfiguring core working hours or team standups. Other times, colleagues have stepped in to take customer calls or phone screens with candidates to spread out the workload.
The gratitude bombs have also been an impactful and fun way to demonstrate support. A gratitude bomb is a list of things about a team member the rest of the team is grateful for, whether it’s a recent win, their sense of humor or the way they always check in at the end of a long week. We’ve seen employees across the business organically pick up the practice, surprising a team member over Slack or email when they least expect it. Shoutouts during the weekly all company town hall and on Slack have become more common too.
Many of the challenges we face right now are outside of our control, but something we can do is visibly and vocally express our gratitude for one another. Expressing gratitude of course existed at EQ before COVID-19, but it’s been amazing to see the practice expand and deepen.
Recent events aside, why is your company such a wonderful place to work?
PEOPLE First and foremost, the people make EverQuote what it is. EverQuote is filled with extremely talented, intelligent and caring individuals. Our employees care not only about getting work done, but about one another, our customers, our consumers and our communities. We strive to be an environment where people can be their authentic selves and share their interests with one another as a means of building trust and connection. This is best reflected in the Slack channels and Employee Resource Groups that enable colleagues to share their passions, talents and skills with one another. It’s also reflected in the people policies we have that are designed to support our employees as whole people, whether it’s through generous medical benefits, unlimited PTO or flexible working arrangements.
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY Insurance may not be an obviously exciting industry (as much as we love it!), but there is a tremendous amount of innovation happening in all parts of the value chain right now. Matching insurance with the people who need it is a $146B industry, and yet only 4% of marketing spend is directed to online channels despite over 70% of consumers starting their purchase journey online. We have a once-in-a-career opportunity in front of us and are energized about bringing innovation to an industry that is still in the early days of its digital transformation.
INNOVATION Our vision is to be the largest online source of insurance policies by using data and technology to make insurance decisions simpler, more affordable and personalized. Data-centricity is one of our core values, and we lean on this value to ensure that everyone at all levels of the organization has a voice. If you bring data to bear when pitching an idea or a change in direction, it will be heard and acted on regardless of where you sit in the org structure. We are also investing heavily in our data science and machine learning capabilities to improve the speed and accuracy of our marketplace. There is tremendous opportunity to iterate and experiment at EQ, and we welcome creative bootstrappers who thrive on the “test and learn” mentality.
DE&I has been of utmost importance at EverQuote for a while now, and I’m encouraged to see the conversation around it — within tech as a whole — becoming a louder one. What are some of the initiatives you’ve enacted and seen success with already?
Our earliest initiative to support diversity, equity and inclusion was our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), all of which were organically employee launched and led. In the past year, we made the ERG system more structured so that they receive support and funding from the organization, including an executive sponsor from the senior leadership team. Today, these groups include EverBlack, EverQueer, Women’s Forum, EverGreen (for environmentally focused initiatives), and EverNation (for international employees). Philanthropy and allyship are incorporated into all of the groups.
We strive to create a welcoming community and safe environment where ALL employees can contribute, grow and lead. We collaborate with our ERGs to build programs to support engagement, mentorship and ally education, but we are also working to “build it right the first time” by creating people policies and OKRs that are designed from the outset to ensure that our employee population resembles our diverse customer population and that all employees have both a seat at the table and a voice in the room.
True to our data-centric roots, we have an analyst who is dedicated part-time to helping us design our DEI efforts and create the dashboards we need to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable. We have also been experimenting with mechanisms for increasing the diversity of our candidate pipeline and reducing bias in our interview process, including blind resume screening, blind coding interviews and partnerships with the National Society of Engineers and She Geeks Out, and we are piloting an internal career development program for women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ employees to ensure that we building a diverse leadership pipeline.
In recent weeks, as a result of the continuing murder of Black people across America and renewed call for the end of police brutality, EverQuote has publicly committed to supporting our Black employees, standing up against racism, violence and police brutality, opening the door for dialogue to ensure we are doing our part to be an agent for change. EverBlack has taken a lead in fostering these conversations, holding an incredibly moving company-wide town hall to address the systemic racism Black Americans face. Piggybacking off this town hall, the company committed to matching individual contributions donated to causes related to ending racism. We’re proud to say that we as a company, as individuals and as a community donated $200,000 to organizations promoting racial equality and fighting police brutality. But this is only the beginning for us; we will continue to listen, support, and fight racial inequality within our walls and in our broader communities.
If your tech company is actively hiring, you have not experienced layoffs, and you’re interested in being featured, please fill out this Google Form. I’ll reach out directly.
