As a global, all-remote company, GitLab has a unique story to tell. A key part of telling that story is sharing what it's like to work here, because we wouldn't be successful without our people and our culture. This page outlines our approach to talent brand at GitLab.
If we look 10 years into the future, we picture an iteration of GitLab that's a decade closer to achieving our mission and that has continued to evolve. Our talent brand vision is meant to capture how we picture GitLab evolving over the decade ahead.
There are two parts to this vision:
To achieve the first part, we need to ensure that we’re building a workplace that fits this description. To achieve the second part, we need a thoughtful go-to-market strategy so that over time we become more well known for these things.
To work toward our defined vision, we believe that continually improving on, highlighting, and sharing the following things about GitLab put us on a path toward realizing this vision.
This will require close collaboration with all parts of the People and Marketing Groups as we’ll want to ensure that we promote and communicate the things that move us closer to fulfilling our vision.
As we build GitLab into one of the world’s best workplaces, we will look to increasingly educate candidates and team members about 3 themes that set us apart from other workplaces.
Everyone can contribute
Anyone can thrive
We foster a values-led, remote culture
Talent brand marketing: Aligning our value proposition with a go-to-market plan so that key candidate audiences are aware of GitLab. Matching the look & feel of recruiting materials with the GitLab brand, and creating external campaigns.
Content development: Creation and distribution of candidate & careers content that further our talent acquisition and talent attraction goal.
Education & Enablement: Maintaining the internal & external sources that inform and engage candidates from pre-apply to hired.
Partners & Sponsorships: Identifying and building relationships with digital & events partners that can help us reach new audiences
Team member engagement: Bring team members along on the journey through storytelling, empower team members to become GitLab ambassadors, and share information transparently so that the company we’re building reflects the company we’re promoting.
We use a number of tactics to bring GitLab’s value proposition to life. Using talent brand marketing and content development we’ll create candidate-facing materials that show GitLab as an employer of choice. Additionally, candidate and public engagement & education alongside partnerships & sponsorships will provide added evidence that our value proposition is an accurate reflection of who we are as a company. Lastly, internal communication will bring team members on the journey with us and help engage team members so that our culture remains strong.
As we consider the ways in which we will bring our value proposition to life, we’ve also landed on several design principles to help guide the tactics we choose to deploy within the key areas mentioned above.
Do less, but go bigger: We’re currently spread too thin given the amount of context shifting across tactics; we’ll decide which tactics look most promising and put our focus there.
Measure & analyze to continually improve over time: We need to choose tactics that can be measured and understood so that we can align on ways to improve.
Nail the basics: We need to do a better job of getting the basics right (i.e. how we post jobs, what our job ads look like, social media sharing).
Invite GitLab team members to be a part of the journey: Bring team members along on the journey through storytelling, empower team members to become GitLab ambassadors and seek input from across the company to continually iterate.
We strive to be as transparent as possible, but this section is only for GitLab team members.
FY24 Talent Brand Go-to-market strategy and roadmap
The life at GitLab content library is a curated list of blog posts, articles, videos, awards, and quick facts that help tell the story of life at GitLab.
Spread the word about life at GitLab by becoming a GitLab talent ambassdor.
Whether you're a hiring manager or an individual contributor, this page outlines additional steps you can take to help represent our talent brand and attract more great people to join the team.
As we create campaigns and sponsor events, it's often the case that we create new resources that are intended to educate candidates about careers with GitLab. Many of the resources we create can be repurposed for other use cases. Some existing resources that both recruiters and talent ambassadors can use include:
Animated short-form video for social media or event usage: Using a google slide deck as a starting point and animating those slides into an .mp4 video is an easy way to create an engaging social media or event asset.
Our GitLab jobs site is where candidates can find information about working at GitLab, along with a link to view our job opportunities.
We incorporate content about hiring and our culture on GitLab's social media accounts so that there's one central place for candidates and the community to find out more about the company as a whole.
On LinkedIn, we have a specific career page where candidates can find out more about life at GitLab.
There are a number of videos on our YouTube channel that relate to working here:
We want to be sure candidates who come across GitLab's profile on employer review sites have an accurate picture of what it's like to work here. There are some sites where GitLab has a company profile, but we do not own it or pay for additional features. On others, we have a managed presence.
We encourage team members to leave reviews and share their stories on these sites to continue to keep an updated profile. We welcome both positive and negative feedback in these reviews.
As an engaged employer with Glassdoor, we're able to customize the branded content, videos, links, and images on our Glassdoor profile. Our contract with Glassdoor includes pages in these countries:
The Talent Brand Manager keeps track of new company reviews and escalates them as needed for an external response and internal action. Here's our process for tracking and escalating reviews.
As an open, transparent company, the OpenCompany designation is important for us to have to best represent our talent brand. We take action to maintain this status throughout the year.
Achieving and maintaining OpenCompany requires that you:
To be sure the details on our profile stay up to date, we review these items quarterly and make any needed updates:
Comparably is an employer review site that also offers recruitment marketing tools and award programs. We no longer have a paid profile with Comparably (ended in 2020).
Our goal on the site is to maintain our profile and keep the feedback up to date by annually (Q3) sending a link to all team members where they can consider leaving feedback or a review.
To give the most authentic view of life at GitLab, we encourage team members to blog about their experiences. You can find many of these posts in the culture section of the GitLab blog.
We promote life at GitLab and our open roles on HackerNews.
On the first of the month (or closest business day after) at 11 a.m. ET, the Talent Brand Manager will post a comment for GitLab in the Hacker News thread called "Who's Hiring". Here's a template that will be updated monthly by the Talent Brand Manager:
Template text (updated for 2021-05-01):
GitLab, Remote only, Full time
As one of the world’s largest all-remote companies, GitLab is a place where you can contribute from almost anywhere. We're an ambitious, productive team that embraces a set of shared values in everything we do.
We were recently named one of Fortune's Best Workplaces in Technology, and it’s an exciting time to join the GitLab team.
We're hiring across the company. Check out our opportunities: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
HackerNews Notes:
Our talent brand team evaluates employer awards and recognition to determine if there are particular awards that, if won, will help us to better attract talented people to want to join GitLab. We also see employer awards as a way to benchmark ourselves against our talent competitors, we want to know how credible third-party organizations rate us against our peers to ensure we continue to be a great place to work.
Check out the content library for a list of the latest awards and recognition related to working at GitLab.
We partner closely with the Corporate Marketing team to apply for and track employer awards and recognition each year. More details and our process for applying to these awards can be found on this page.
These awards are important to GitLab's talent brand beacuse they raise awareness for why GitLab is such a unqiue place to work.
There are several different reasons why we may choose to apply for a particular employer or workplace award. The top reasons we apply for various awards include:
We highly encourage team members to share the news about any GitLab employer award wins with their social media networks. Follow these easy steps and you'll be ready to share. If you'd like additional guidance please reach out to the #talent-brand slack channel.
A foundational aspect of our talent brand is the flexibility and autonomy that all-remote work gives our team members. The Talent Brand Manager collaborates closely with the All-Remote Marketing team to raise awareness about remote work and tell the stories of how it's impacted the lives of our team members. Learn more about GitLab's approach to remote work on our all-remote page.
Here are the definitions for the performance indicators listed in the talent brand job family.
Our team member engagement or net promoter ("I would recommend GitLab as a great place to work.") score is measured annually in the Culture Amp survey. Here are samples of the statements team members were asked to consider:
Defined on the People Group Metrics page.
Overall number of job candidate referrals from GitLab team members.
[Defined]Hires vs plan on the People Group Metrics page.
