The End of the "Sentiment" Era: How Big Data Kills Pay-to-Play Employer Badges

[00:00:02] HR tech, work tech, and investment are transforming the future of work. Are you in the know? Welcome to the WorkTech Podcast. Join host George LaRock for expert insights on the trends, M&A activity, and strategies shaping the workplace. Brought to you by OneWorkTech.com and the WorkDefined Podcast Network. Hey everybody, welcome back to WorkTech. It's me, George LaRocque, and got a really interesting conversation to have today.

[00:00:32] I am joined by Rajiv Chandra-Sakaran. Did I- Yeah, you got it, George. Awesome. Awesome. Rajiv is the Managing Director of the Schultz Family Foundation. And I'm so excited to talk to you today about this new initiative that you all have rolled out. But I'm not going to steal your thunder. Let's start with a quick intro for everyone. If you could tell everyone a little bit about yourself and the Schultz Family Foundation.

[00:01:02] And where you work matters. And then we'll go from there. Great, George. Great to be on with you. Hey, so I come to this in a somewhat untraditional or nontraditional way, which might speak to the paths that so many American workers take through their economy these days.

[00:01:18] I was a former journalist. I spent 21 years at the Washington Post before I met a guy named Howard Schultz, who's the modern day leader of Starbucks and scaled Starbucks into 50,000 stores globally.

[00:01:32] And in so doing, I found out how to really create great frontline jobs in America. And I now have the privilege of working at his family foundation with a real focus on creating greater economic opportunity for all Americans, with a real focus on the next generation of Americans. And over the past couple of years, we've been working on a project called Where You Work Matters.

[00:01:56] And there's a fundamental truth behind it that I hope we can unspool here in our conversation, which is it really matters not just what you do, but where you do it in the American economy.

[00:02:09] The two people doing almost the very same job can be paid, retained and advanced in vastly different ways based less on how hard they work, how smart they are, the gumption they possess, and much more based on the practices of their employer. And with that understanding, the inevitable question is, well, then where are the places where workers can really build careers in this modern economy?

[00:02:39] And that's what the Where You Work Matters list aims to demystify for workers and also to help show businesses how well they are doing in creating good jobs to really maximize their human capital and to prepare themselves for the growth they need to come. Yeah. It's such a great, there's so many problems to solve in that old statement that you just made.

[00:03:04] But I want to make sure that I mention before we get into the how, or I guess maybe it leads into the how pretty well, you have another partner in this, which is the Burning Glass Institute, who in our market, in the sort of HR tech, work tech space, we know Burning Glass became part of Lightcast, a huge provider of labor market data, workforce data.

[00:03:29] And what a lot of folks might not know is that the Burning Glass Foundation really remained whole after the transaction and has access to all that beautiful work, to beautiful data, to do beautiful work, to do good work like this. So they're a principal part of, they're not the only data points though, right? From what I gather. But they are the data partner here.

[00:03:52] And Matt Siegelman, who runs the Burning Glass Institute, who built Burning Glass, the company, and then spun out the institute after the acquisition, with a real focus on bringing better labor market intelligence for the public good, is our partner on this. And we do this kind of arm in arm. We also co-developed the methodology with Joe Fuller, who leads the Managing the Future Work Project at Harvard Business School. So there is a triumvirate nature to this.

[00:04:19] But the data that we use for Where You Work Matters draws very heavily on the Burning Glass Institute's career history database, which really tracks the career progression of millions and millions of Americans across thousands of employers. And mining that and then combining that with other data inputs, including job postings data from Lightcast,

[00:04:44] including the entire Glassdoor salary data set, enables us to get the empirical foundations we need to be able to rate companies and rate occupations. And what's really important here, and I know we'll talk about this, is we're not just rating companies overall. But what the Where You Work Matters list does that is so profound, so breakthrough, is we get down to the occupational level.

[00:05:13] I was just talking to the CHRO of Procter & Gamble yesterday. We look at something like 70-plus unique occupations just at P&G. And when you look across all of the companies that we assess, we are assessing almost 55,000 occupations.

[00:05:31] And so it's this unique ability for both the enterprise but also the worker to see how well companies are doing right down to the role level. And this kind of empirical assessment heretofore has just never been widely available. Yeah. There's so much that I love about this. You know, I've written about it. You had briefed me when this launched a couple of months ago.

[00:06:00] I think when most people hear about this, they think, oh, gosh, you know, that's what we need is another survey to send our workforce. But I think that's one of the beautiful things here is you're actually not – there isn't a survey. This is basically – you're leveraging the data that is available. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how that all comes together?

[00:06:22] This is so fundamentally different from every other great place to work list out there or best company to work for. And it's really different in a couple of different ways. So the first is it's not based on what companies say they're doing. It's not based, you know, on how well a company's PR department filled out a survey from a glossy magazine. So it's not that.

[00:06:46] It's also not based on just querying small groups of workers to get sentiment analysis and, you know, how do people, you know, feel about their jobs? Well, there's value there. I don't want to dismiss it. But in some cases, you know, those sentiment analyses can be skewed by whether, you know, you had a good or a bad day at work yesterday. And so what we do that is so fundamentally unique is we look at what's actually happened.

[00:07:14] Millions of workers over a five-year period based on how they are reporting their career progression. And so how do we do this? I get – is the – you've got an inevitable question. It begs. Well, what Burning Glass is able to do is vacuum up literally hundreds of millions of data points about American workers.

[00:07:36] So everything from how people represent their career progression on social media sites, places like LinkedIn and beyond, how people describe their career history in resumes they post online. Think of places like Indeed, but then there are many others across the labor market. And then we take in the pay data by a glass door with permission. We look at open roles to understand workforce composition, hiring levels, and so forth.

[00:08:04] And all that's put in a massive data set. And part of the secret sauce here is really an ability using a bunch of algorithms to understand what people's social media profiles or resumes really say. So we know, for instance, that George, who might describe his job as an associate at Walmart, is not the same job as Rajiv, who says he's an associate at a law firm, perhaps.

[00:08:34] Two fundamentally different things, both same title, right? But, you know, Joe, who says he's a guest services representative for the Target Corporation, is actually an equivalent retail sales job as George, who's that Walmart associate. And so we're able to essentially compare apples to apples. And that's what's critically important here, because we don't compare the entire workforce of Walmart to that of Microsoft.

[00:09:01] We compare at the occupational level. So we look at how do accountants at Walmart do compared to accountants at Microsoft? How do sales managers at Walmart compare to sales managers at Microsoft? And so we compare like by like across different companies. That allows us to compare companies with different business models and in different sectors in ways that don't bias for or against one or the other. It also allows us to then understand how a company does overall so we can rate that company overall.

[00:09:31] But our our occupational level analysis allows us to tell you whether that Walmart associate job is that a great first job is a great early career job. Is it a great job to grow your career? Is it a great job that will create long term stability for you? And so we have these key archetypes at every occupation. We essentially assess in those three ways. Is this great for the early career? Is this great for your growth stage? Is it great for stability? And that's the kind of the core of this list.

[00:10:01] And so, you know, if if you are working for any one of the kind of one thousand seven hundred and fifty largest employers in America, not just publicly traded companies, but also large private companies, large nonprofits like large regional health systems and so forth. But chances are we're assessing your employer and we may not be able to look at every single occupation, but we don't see every job at Walmart. But we see sixty three of them. And so I'm not not only store associates and store managers.

[00:10:29] We have enough data to tell you what's the job of a butcher at Walmart like? What's the job of an optometrist like? What's the job of a truck driver? Is a truck driver a great growth job at Walmart compared to J.B. Hunt compared to other companies in America? You can go to the Where You Work Matter site and figure out. It's really powerful for consumers, for individuals that are that are trying to figure out, are they in the right place?

[00:10:56] And it's not just the employer, but it's, as you mentioned, the industry. You know, you may be able to transition out of the market that you're currently working in. Also geographically. Right. I mean, I would imagine that as you're looking at your prospects in today's economy, you need to be aware of where the best opportunities are for me, especially someone a little earlier in their career. So there's value both ways here.

[00:11:20] There's value to the worker to be able to see how am I doing compared to other companies either in my sector or other employers in my area. So let's say you're here. I'm in the Seattle area today. And let's say, you know, you work at an Amazon in a certain role. You can go to the Where You Work Matter site and click on that role at Amazon, see how well Amazon's rated for it. But then you can also compare it to that same role.

[00:11:48] Let's say Microsoft or Boeing or T-Mobile, other large employers in the Seattle area and see how it compares. So that's that's critical benchmarking insight for the worker. Now, let's put ourselves in the shoes of somebody managing talent at at Amazon and they are competing for for talent. You know, they don't look at the company as a monolith. They're looking at the occupational.

[00:12:13] And so, you know, they might want to benchmark how well am I doing compared to Walmart and and Lowe's on certain and Costco on certain occupations. And then another more tech focused occupations. They may their their comps may be more Google or Microsoft or others. And so you can and what this enables companies to do it, we know that every large enterprise has lots of internal HR data and they have their own benchmarks.

[00:12:43] But this is a uniform yardstick that a company can use at the occupational level. They'll see how well they're doing compared to any competitor for at the occupation level. And so it adds something to the world of kind of corporate benchmarks that that heretofore just hasn't existed in as transparent and accessible a way as we've made it with where you work matter. Yeah.

[00:13:10] And, you know, the other assumptions based on the way the market has worked is that this must be the tip of the spear behind a platform that is selling me, you know, the system to do workforce planning. And that that's not the case. This is this is truly a you know, I know it's on a Web site. It's an interactive experience to access the data. But this is really accessible for anyone who's interested.

[00:13:35] It's not just accessible easily, George, but it's a project in the public interest. And that's what also makes it fundamentally different from every other one of these assessments. Not only do we not charge companies or workers to access this data, there's no there's no business around this for us. This is philanthropically funded for the good of the American economy, the good of the American worker. And it's three not for profit organizations between the Schultz Family Foundation, Burning Glass and Harvard Business School that are collaborating on this.

[00:14:05] And so we're not trying to sell, you know, magazines. We're not trying to, you know, charge companies to get some plaque to hang on the wall. It's truly unbiased insight for the public. So I know my audience. That's why I asked those questions or I framed them that way. So looking at this data, did anything jump out at you and surprise you? Were there any aha moments or which ones stand out? So why do we call this where you work matters, George?

[00:14:33] As I started out by saying, you know, there's a fundamentally different experience for two workers doing the same job, but they could be very different employers. When you look at that in aggregate, when we look at 20 common occupations across the U.S. economy that we just use as a proxy here, the difference in retention between being in that role, a platinum rated role versus the average unrated role. Same job.

[00:15:01] You're 26% more likely to stay for more than three years. You're 68% more likely to be promoted internally in a five-year period. You're 38% more likely to move to better roles externally. And you're 48% more likely to earn more than your peer. That matters.

[00:15:20] We calculated this for the average administrative assistant, the difference being at working for a company where admins are platinum rated versus working at the kind of average unrated company. Over the course of your working life, the difference in your overall comp could be as much as $1.2 million. Wow. Like, who wouldn't want to leave more than a million dollars on the table?

[00:15:48] Yet we make these decisions with incomplete data. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most, when people tell the story of their career, very few actually, well, it sounds like it was well thought out. And, you know, it's usually a series of decisions based on what was immediately in front of them. Right. I needed a job and it presented itself or a friend called with an opportunity. There wasn't a lot of data that came into, you know, what should my next move be?

[00:16:16] I mean, it's the exceptions who work that way. But this is a really powerful tool. So would that admin who is thinking in this way, they go to the site and then how does it actually work from that? Where does it go from there for someone like that? You ask a very good question. Right now, the Where You Work Matters site is really aimed at the corporate audience. Okay.

[00:16:44] It's aimed at helping our professionals see how well their companies are doing, enabling you to see how well you do vis-a-vis competitors. We are working diligently to make this data more available in forms that will be much more easily consumed by workers.

[00:17:01] We're working on a first-of-a-kind, really intuitive tool that will enable any American worker, regardless of whether they work at the 1,750, where you work matter success companies or not. So any worker to see the health of their career with sharing with just a few pieces of data. And we want to release that this fall. Okay. We're working with a bunch of career navigation partners to embed this data in there.

[00:17:31] We'll have more to say about that in the coming weeks. We're also looking at ways to start to share this data with some of the large LLMs out there. So we want to bring this to people, but we recognize that a site kind of designed for the enterprise audience may not be the easiest way. But if you are a go-getter and you want to see how well your employer is doing and you are working for one of the larger companies,

[00:17:52] you can go to whereyouworkmatters.org and explore, and you can find your role and see how well you stack up both through our ratings architecture as well as how you stack up with your competitors. But, you know, you were asking about some unexpected things. I think that, you know, one other thing that's worth workers thinking about as they're thinking about how they want to grow their career

[00:18:17] is that sometimes the best places to grow and thrive are not in places you expect. And that's one of the great takeaways from the Where You Work Matters list. Like not every job at the most high-flying, popular, biggest brand companies in America are great jobs. And they're also great jobs places, you know, again, people don't always expect. So let's take an example. You know, you're coming out of college.

[00:18:46] A lot of people are this time of year. And they're looking, you know, let's say they have an econ degree or something like that. And they want to start out as a financial analyst. Okay. Now, the general advice might be, all right, now go apply to kind of some of the big banks and investment houses in America, right? Those are going to be the best places where you might want to, you know, have a good career as a financial analyst. Well, we assess that occupation at 138 firms in the banks and financial services center.

[00:19:16] Guess what? Only six out of those 138 we rate as platinum across early career growth and stability are three key archetypes. So if you want to start as a financial analyst and grow your career and then have great stability. Only six banks and investment houses are. But guess what? There are 27 other firms in America where it is platinum across all three. But they're not in the financial services sector. It's companies like General Mills, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Nike.

[00:19:45] So you, you know, you think it, they're great software developer jobs that aren't in the tech sector. In fact, a lot of those software developer jobs in the tech sector are being very severely AI impacted today. But in other sectors, there's less AI impact. And so, again, as we analyze the data, we see in so many different ways just such profound importance here for the American worker, which is what's kind of driving us to find ways to make this more widely accessible.

[00:20:15] Yeah. And I think for the employers, like the other side of that is they may find, let's say, an employer who is platinum rated, you know, for in not in tech, but in, you know, data analyst roles or something like this could look at grabbing folks out of tech with some messaging or some of the by getting their opportunities in front of the right people in those other industries,

[00:20:38] in those other areas to pull them into, you know, consumer package goods or, you know, et cetera, other industries. That's a great point, George. So if you are, let's say, in manufacturing and you have high, you know, we rate you as a great growth employer, great stability employer in, let's say, a tech field, you know, software development or data science, pick one. It could become a powerful part of the value proposition, right?

[00:21:06] So you can say, hey, look, we're a great place to work. We'll tell you all the reasons why. But here's this empirical assessment. It's not us doing the work. You know, this was a outside looking in assessment. And guess what? We're actually a better place to grow and thrive as a software developer compared to all of those companies in Silicon Valley that, you know, may be catching your eye. Yeah, yeah. That's fantastic.

[00:21:30] So you gave us a little glimpse to what's coming on the consumer side, on the job seeker side, the employee side. In a general sense, what's, you know, when you look in your crystal ball for the future for this, what does the future hold? Well, the future holds us really trying to push this work forward. So ways we can start to bring in some additional data, provide even more granularity.

[00:21:54] We'd like to get to a place where we're actually helping companies understand some of the benchmarks at the occupational level that get you to gold, that get you to platinum. So companies that want to improve their practices can set clear and attainable targets for where they want to get to. And so we recognize there's work to be done to help American businesses create more good jobs that are in their interest.

[00:22:21] And then obviously we've talked about ways to bring this insight to workers. And, you know, we think for both businesses and workers, this type of insight into companies where you really can grow, where mobility is such a key part of this, of how we assess occupations, could not be more important in the age of AI, George.

[00:22:44] None of us have a perfect crystal ball that will reveal how just how quickly and how significantly any specific occupation, any specific employer, any specific sector is going to be impacted. We know it's coming. We know some occupations will be disrupted more than others. We know there'll be challenges. We know there'll be opportunities.

[00:23:06] But if you're managing through this and we're at the early stages of this wave kind of cresting on the shore and you're an HR professional, what I would say is the companies that are going to be best positioned to navigate this are going to be those that have really built great internal talent pathways that have built what we call mobility muscle. That know that they're already know how to kind of train people to move laterally into openings.

[00:23:34] They can fill vacancies. They have up on an org chart with people growing from within because we know certain occupational clusters will be impacted. And the companies that can pivot and move people from places where they may need fewer folks to where they may need more in a nimble way are going to be those that are going to be best able to adapt and thrive. And so I look at companies that do well on this list as companies that have built that mobility muscle.

[00:24:04] And I think workers should also look at that and say, you know what? I want to be in a place that has great experience that has already built talent pathways because I don't know what the future holds, but I want to be in a place where I know that it's not always going to be a dead end, that I'm going to have paths to grow my career. Yeah, that's a really great point.

[00:24:25] And I think it's also that's a great time to offer if anybody looking to learn more on any side of this, the employer or employee side, how do they what's the best way to engage with the data and learn more? Well, delve into the Where You Work Matters website. It's very simple. Where You Work Matters dot org. And if it prompts questions, there's a way to reach out and contact us.

[00:24:48] And, you know, we we we just want more people to engage with the data and find ways to make it useful, whether they are an HR leader or they're a worker looking for the next great opportunity out there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll share the links and also links back to the of the piece that we did after first learning about this. And Rajiv, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for being here and telling your story on WorkTech.

[00:25:18] Hey, George, thanks for the great questions. Thanks for what you do. Love this conversation with you. Yeah, same, same. And we'll have you back and check in, see how things progress. Look forward to it. All right. Thanks, everybody, wherever you're watching or listening until next time.