Meet The Bitly Team! by Amira Ravo

Amira Ravo
Senior Talent Acquisition Partner
Ariane Huens
Senior Talent Acquisition Partner

Video Transcription

But we can kick this off. So, so thanks everyone for joining and for being interested in getting to know more about Bitly um in this uh presentation or conversation.We would love to introduce you more about the cultural side and about the product of Bitly and especially about talent acquisition here. So, next slide, please. So this is our agenda for today. So first of all, we would like to introduce ourselves. So Ian and I um then we will talk about the products of bit because it's not only we are out shortening as most people would probably think of. Um Next, we will talk about the culture. So why do people like working here? How is it working at Bitly? And uh we have also the honor of having two of our engineering from our engineering leadership who will with who we will have a Q and A session. And then by the end, you will also have the chance to ask any of your questions. All right now, hand over to Arian.

Awesome. Thank you, Amira. Hi, everyone. My name's Arion. I am the senior talent acquisition partner focused on engineering product and design in the US for bitly. Um And I've been in the industry for about nine years or so now. Um been through various tech companies and different roles throughout my career. But I love to just talk about bit we and share with you all what makes our culture so unique. I think one of the main reasons I'm here is the collaboration, the team partnership. You never feel like you don't have a seat at the table here. And one of the main focuses that we're talking about today is really that camaraderie and the partnership and having everybody have a voice. So I'm excited to share that with you all in the mirror and

take away. Yes, my name is Amira. I'm based in Germany and um I'm mainly responsible for all the engineering product and data roles here. Um On the youth side, um I'm working since over 2.5 years already at Bley. And since then, I've always have always appreciate the international environment, the ambitious goals that we have. So everyone in this company is very ambitious about what they're doing, very passionate as well. And also what I really like is the people focused culture here.

Um I mean, Arianna and I, we are also both women and tech and we without having like this technical background, so we can't really code, but we are still constantly in contact with engineers and um having such a great team in the engineering uh department that understands that and still takes us seriously and helps us to understand all the roles, all the requirements.

What does each programming language really means? Um It's really, really helpful in my job and also makes the conversation with the candidates, of course, very, very fun because they've, um this is something that they regularly get feedback. They're like, oh, this is just a recruiter and she doesn't probably understand what view GS is or what no GS is or whatever. Um But we tend to go real dive deeper into detail about the technologies and um really give them this to appreciate their time and appreciate all the roles that we're having. Um Yeah, so having this on a level conversation with our engineering department and with the candidates um without having this technical background is something that I really, really appreciate about this company and about being a woman in tech a bitly. So, and yeah, speaking of bit Lee, um I would like to introduce to you what we are working on. Uh because as mentioned in the beginning, it's not only we shortening. So next slide, please. So we are known for being a catalyst for connections. And uh what does that mean? Next slide. So, and that means basically we want to educate the word about how links QR codes and Linkin bios drive business results. And um so I mentioned the links QR Codes and Link and bio.

So in the next slide I would um introduce you. What, how does uh what does exactly means? So we're having admit three PS and um one of them is the link management, which is mostly known here, which is the r shortening. Another one is link and bio. So you can click on one link and then you can decide where you want to be redirected to another platform that we have, which most people don't know that this is being supported by Wiley is the QR code generator and it is actually one of the most world most used one and most famous one.

So we can customize U QR codes, you can track the QR codes and and it's been used by almost any kind of different background of a customer. And then the next slide, I would also like to show you some numbers. So currently we have over half of a million global customers and global customers means from over 190 countries. And if you think of how many countries are existing, uh right now, this is quite a lot. So um almost any country that you can imagine, we might have customers over there. And um I mean over 55, 5.7 million monthly active users is also quite a huge number for our industry or compared to our competitors. And um 10 billion monthly connections says why we are a catalyst for connections? I think. So these are the facts and numbers in the products. So now um Arianna and I would like to tell you more about the culture. So why do people like to work at this country? Who are the people that are behind these numbers, behind these products? So people work at this company when you are, when you're joining uh Bitly, you are known for being a bit. So whenever you open your laptop, you are in this Bitly world as a bit. And um yeah, you're part of a whole like um yeah, your own city, you could say.

And also another thing is which is really, really liked by most of the people or by everyone here, your team might be named after an animal. So Arian will show us in the next slides or uh oh, back please. Mhm It's ok. So I will show you in the next slides. Uh What this actually means. Uh if the uh company, if your team is named by an animal and when you start working here, you will get a bo a Bitly body, it doesn't have to be necessary, someone from your team, it can be also someone outside of your um department. So someone who will basically help you with the onboarding and um guide you or help you guiding you through the whole on boarding experience. Um So we do have very comprehensive uh benefits seriously because these are obviously not all of our benefits. Um I would hand over to Arrian for the most or one of the most exciting parts about working at Wiley.

Thanks, Amira. Yeah. One of the awesome things about onboarding remotely is that you do get a bitly buddy because we do have a remote friendly culture. We're dispersed all over the world and it's nice to have somebody to be able to bounce ideas off of and guide you through your onboarding journey, especially when you start with us fresh. But as mentioned, we do have the remote friendly culture. We like to meet up for different events in person, holiday parties, collaboration, meetings, or brainstorming sessions. But if you desire to work in an office, maybe part time, you can do that too. We have a few locations. So we have locations out in Germany, Denver where I'm actually based and New York City where our headquarters is. So there are options to meet up with your team in the office and collaborate. We do have a hub and spoke model as we call it. So if you are located on the western side of the US, you might be connected to Denver east coast people, New York City would be your home base. And so we do try to collaborate and meet as much as we can but also remain remote first. And one of our proudest accomplishments that we've had really recently within the last year or so, which I can't believe it's just been overall wind, but we actually brought on a new Chief Diversity Officer who, Jackie, you might have heard her speak yesterday.

Hopefully you were able to attend that session, but we did stand up six new employee resource groups actually throughout Bitly, which you can see them all here, we all have some awesome logos for each of them and then also Ad E I Council on top of that. So you'll see here just furthering our commitment to de and I, we did launch these er GS and they're all employee led. So they're just created to really continue to ensure that bitly is a great place to work and inclusive for all the Diversity Council also really holds things together and keeps us organized. But um really, they've launched a ton of different luncheon learns. We did a whole entire month dedicated to women for women's month. So we had speakers invited, we had each of the employee resource groups planning out events to educate each other and just continue to make sure that we keep D and I as a forefront for the organization. So super exciting be on the lookout. We have a spotlight on inclusion where we also uh really put a spotlight on nonprofits and you know, showcase the important work that they're doing so more on that later. But here are some pictures of our team. So we have something very unique to Bit Lee and that is who we call Chaunte, who you saw in the beginning of the presentation. Chauncey is a puffer fish, uh puffer fish, excuse me.

And no one really knows exactly the origin of Chauncey or how that all came about. But he has really evolved just throughout the years and Chauncey takes on many forms. No two are alike as you can see. Here are really some chauncey's that represent mascots for a different engineering team. So we have the ambiguous hedgehogs. The can taker Kin, Kinka jus, that's a mouthful of the T seals. We have the Creative Komodo. All of your teams here are going to be named after an animal and we continue to add more and more each day with a funny adjective to describe each team. So they are super fun. Um And the awesome thing about chauncey, which Amira just got to present at our company Wide all hands right before this. But every anniversary that we have when somebody hits their five year anniversary, they get their very own chauncey. So it looks like you, it takes on its own form and they're all really cute. So we love our chauncey around here and it is something very unique to Bentley that we love to highlight.

Mm Yes, but this is of course not all we have very flexible working hours which I personally really appreciate because um I have a niece that I take care uh of sometimes um as my uh sister is a single mom and um yeah, as I have flexible working hours I can schedule my day as it suits me the best as long as I communicate, of course, with the team.

And um I can make sure that I can have a really, really great work life balance. And especially when you're working across different time zones, this is very important that we like respect everyone's um time, everyone's work life. And um yeah, we offer for that very flexible working hours. Um but we also get um so um Arian has mentioned already that we are very first company and when you start working at this company, you will get a budget of €500 that you can use to buy. Um any fancy new homework equipment, for example, new desk, a new chair, headphones, whatever you need to feel comfortable working from home. Um but all the hardware will of course be provided um outside of the budget uh by bitly, but you also can do is vacation, vacation is a combination between work and vacation, which means that you can, for example, travel to the summer uh close to the beach and you can like work.

And um yeah, and be still like at the beach some somewhere outside of your home. So you don't have to take uh for example, um paid vaca or your paid vacation. Um We do have lots of paid vacation. But if you want to, for example, um travel to Germany or from Germany to New York and you want to work there for two weeks and maybe take two weeks of vacation. Um Then you can do that, of course and stay longer in uh at a place. Um What we also have, which has been highlighted, I think a few times already, it's international and diverse work environment. Um We have only in customer support, we have over six or seven different languages that we support for our um customers. But also says a lot about the cultural uh international environment of us as a company, what we also have is parental leave. I mean for Germany, this is already given by law. But in the US, what I have learned as a German based uh citizen is that it's not given by law, but business supports that um learning and development budget. So we, as mentioned in the beginning, we have very passionate and very ambitious people here working a bitly and we really want to encourage them to learn and to develop in their career.

So for that, we have a budget that they can use for um taking classes, buying a new book or anything that will help them or going to meet up whatever will help them to develop in their career. And very importantly, we love memes. I don't know any other department than the engineering team that share so many teams, they would even edit themselves the memes and um in a way of like fun communications. So yeah, so yeah, obviously, we don't take ourselves so seriously. So then I went back to a

thank you, me. Yeah, we definitely love to have fun. There are several slack groups and different, just various chats going on where we do like to share memes and dad jokes, which it's my personal favorite. But um so going into this, obviously, our leadership team and carving out a space for DN I and and most importantly, women in leadership is very important to us. And something that we take very seriously over 59% of our global leadership team are women. And we definitely continue to just ensure that we are maintaining a diverse environment and really promoting growing and, and maintaining that women in leadership. So the way that we try to do this is really our global leadership team just continues to focus on increasing its overall representation.

Obviously, we're here highlighting women in leadership and that's why we're all chatting today, but genuinely our DN I efforts focus on creating a space for women, minorities and just ensuring that it's amazing place to work for us. All this includes us being a remote first company.

Me personally, I have a son, I also am a dog mom. I have three dogs. I have a puppy and being able to get up and turn my slack off on pause for a second walk, the puppy, go pick up my son if he has an appointment, things like that. These are things that we really promote and encourage just making sure that you take care of yourself first and being remote first is a huge way that we're able to remain flexible and just working to remove bias from the hiring process. In general, we obviously are working every single day to continuously keep up on trainings for our employees and make sure that everyone is educated or anyone by just going through the interview process and making sure that we remove any unconscious bias from that. Billy also has received several awards just in the last year. I've been here about a year and a half and it just seems like they keep coming. But it's amazing our commitment just to the employees and making sure that we remain a leader in the industry and just really setting the trend in the standard for DN I efforts.

We did win great place to work award within this last year attendance award in the EU and then also a best Employer Branding award, which we're just super proud of. All right. And I know Michaela was having some technical difficulties. I'm not sure her and left that were able to join yet or you are able to get here. I cannot see on my screen. Not sure if you're able to see a mirror.

Um I think you muted uh OKA of course, I can't hear you, Victoria. Are you here? Let's see,

I see Michaela see you popping in you there.

She's here but I uh I, I think she's muted or like the uh sound is not, I mean, not muted but it's not working. Take your time. We have a couple of minutes left.

Technical difficulties popping in

who would have guessed

either way we, we do. We are fortunate to be lucky enough to have some of our leaders here today.

Can you hear us? Yes. Yeah, we're here. Uh we were trying to speak but somehow you, you were not able to hear us. We're here from. Thank you very much and sorry, there's some issues with the link and we were not able to unmute ourselves. So um yeah, that's why, but we uh we are following you. Uh Sorry for this. Uh

Oh, no worries. I'm just glad that you all are here and thank you for joining. We wanted to carve out some time and give you all a few minutes to just share some insights and also for everyone on the call um to be able to ask you questions just directly on your day to day and who better to hear it from than two of our women that are on the engineering team and in leadership.

So really quickly, I would love uh Mia and let if you could introduce yourself, your location, your role and tell us how long you've been at Bitly to start out. So, Mia, if you want to kick us off, that'd be awesome.

Can you hear me now? Yes. Yes. OK. Cool. Um Sorry. So you want, can you repeat what you want us to tell you? I was trying to figure out my microphone.

Yes, absolutely. If you just want to do a quick intro where you're based your role and, and how long you've been here? Yeah.

Um So my name is Mia Clawson. I am based in the Denver office. Um I work as an engineering manager for the Creative Commodo team and I've been with Bitly for about 4.5 years.

Awesome and left idea if you want to introduce yourself as well.

Sure. My name is Teria. So, uh my location is currently in Germany Bielefeld Office and I'm working as a boo tech engineer. Uh I'm part of the conversion team, uh and uh in European side and we're mostly like engaged for the whole user flow for sign in, sign up and all payment related things.

Awesome. Thank you so much. I would love if anybody has any questions for them just right off the bat to raise your hand. I encourage you to speak up and we can take any questions if you'd like to type them into the chat or if you would just like to speak up. Either way, if anyone has any questions, we can kick it off there. I'd love to just hear from you if you have any questions on their day to day experience.

So we have one question from Jacqueline. How is it working as a team being in an international company?

I can answer this one or, or? Yeah. Thank you very much for the question. Awesome. I can just share my positive feedback and um it's great. So there is a lot of support, uh a lot of um uh open helpful discussions and uh always uh like um discussing about the solutions together. Uh We're as a big family, let's say. So, working with these great people is just awesome and we can just share a great positive feedback. So we're all supported. And um we're really grateful also for the trust. There's a lot of trust between us and that's really important. So that's why we are growing as we are growing and we are awesome and great team.

Great. Thank you so much. We did have another question too. How do you know Bitly is the right company for you? Uh Mia, do you want to take that one?

Yeah, sure. Um So when I got into Bitly, it was, I had met people outside of Bitly prior to even applying and it was just the, I guess the kindness that they all treated me with, like, I'm sure you guys all have experienced like going into tech meetups and like, people aren't neces, not, aren't necessarily always the most friendly, but the people I met from Bitly were like super friendly.

So that got me interested. I put in an application and then getting here like people are exactly how they seem when you meet them outside of, they're just kind um helpful people that really just want to see everyone succeed. And so to me, those are the type of people that I wanna work with.

Awesome. Thank you

so much. I have here. Another interesting questions. Question. Do the team, uh teams have mix of people from both us and eu the 30? I

don't think we have anything like that right now. Um I think that there

not yet, no, not yet, but uh for some other departments, we do have um like mixed uh teams of us. And eu for example, in talent acquisition, part of the team is located in Germany, part of the team is located in the US. Um But for the uh for engineering team that depends on the needs, if it's required that we have someone or that we can hire someone on the US side better. Um Because of it's a very, maybe a very niche position or something, then we would be open for that as well. But as of right now, it's not really required that we have mixed teams, but there's still lots of collaboration I would guess.

And I think also the data platform is one of the uh a team where there is like mixed colleagues and uh data. But in, in future, I think this will uh pop up, we're working on it.

There is a great question that just came in as well. How does the company encourage innovation? Are there opportunities to take risks? Who would like to take that one?

So, yeah, I can uh uh say some words, Mia if you wanna book bill me afterwards, feel free. Um uh There is like uh always, um we're taking risks for sure. I mean, there is no business uh where no risk is taken, that's how we're moving forward. And uh uh always successfully, let's say, and uh there is uh uh always like open and discussions. So everyone that's really great that I wanna share, so everyone can share their ideas, opinions. So this is how we are bringing up innovations. So there's always like regular uh tech talks. Um Also everyone needs to feel free to set up a session and uh bring some topics up and this is how we uh uh are working currently and it's really great. So, uh everyone uh shares the opinions and they're really welcomed and uh everyone has uh um the opportunity uh to be, uh let's say, like, uh the leader of this uh uh I ideas and uh walk them through. So, uh always on daily basis, uh let's say, and this is how uh we are moving forward. Right?

Absolutely.

Move on from that. Um Also, this isn't necessarily taking a risk, but it does encourage innovation. We have quarterly hack weeks. So we all get to choose something that we're passionate about and you'll work on that. Um People come up with teams and, or they just work on something alone and they go, like, I think this would be a really cool idea but not something that is on the company road map. And so we go add or go hack away on that for a while and see if we can get something to prove that. Like, this would be a really cool idea and actually several of them got merged into this uh CBA slash quarter.

Yes, I love seeing all the projects. They're super fun and I know we have one minute left. So, Amira, if you wanna take that last question

um In addition to me and Jack that jokes, you mean that one? Yes, I know I saw

you.

Yes. Um So you have already mentioned the hack weeks that we are having quarterly where you can work on fun projects. All the things that are not on the road map that you are really interested in and also to work with people that aren't really, that are direct part of your team of your squad. Uh We also have uh regular team events at least twice a year. So during summer and then during winter uh where everyone is invited either to uh Berlin in Germany or to Denver or New York in uh on the side, um you can also have workshops with within your team. So in smaller groups. Um So anything that's kind. Oh, we also have many remote team events because obviously we don't want to wait like six months until we can see each other and have fun together. Um So in between of that time, we also have um yeah, remote team events as well and we are also very open for other suggestions. So if you have made any experience in your past companies, we say, oh, we have done this activity as a team group, as a team together and it was really great. We would be open for that as well.

Awesome. And I know we are at time and in terms of the turnover question, I don't have any exact rates on attrition, but I would be happy to talk through anything with you. We're about to be in the networking booth directly after this. So if anyone has any other questions or wants to discuss anything further, we can absolutely chat further there. Also, we do have this fun contest. If you scan one of these QR codes depending on where you're based and enter our talent pool, we have a fun gift card giveaway just so we can collect everybody that was here. So we're able to follow up, answer any other questions, talk to you further about bit le and hopefully, if you're looking for a position, we can chat with you about anything that we have available. But otherwise come see us at the networking booth and know we just answered a ton of questions. Any other questions that you all have? We'd be happy to link up with you there and uh I will go back to this just in case anybody did wanna scan it before we hop off of the call.

I know we kind of ran through everything at the end here pretty quickly, but otherwise it was so awesome getting to talk with you all today. Thank you so much. And Amira, if you have anything else.

Oh, actually, uh thanks a lot for everyone who was attending and for your interest in Wiley. I hope you get, could get a better picture of what we are doing, who we are. And yes, of course. And during this time we couldn't, I mean, Arian and I could can talk until tomorrow about the company. So we try to live it to the important uh things or most important things. There's anything else you're interested in. Yeah, as Arian mentioned, we will be in the networking space.

Thank you so much, everyone.