Dive Brief:
- Fairygodboss (FGB) announced a $10 million Series A investment from venture capital firms GSV Accelerate and Signal Peak Ventures. In a blog post following International Women's Day, FGB co-founders Georgene Huang and Romy Newman said the funds will allow the company to expand its product and team to support a growing community and its corporate customers.
- According to the founders, FGB began as an anonymous job review platform four years ago and grew into a social network featuring career content, job listings, employer profiles, a personalized daily feed and crowdsourced databases of companies' benefits. The site remains free for users.
- The founders said that FGB's user base grew "30 times over" during the past two years; it now serves 24 million women and has more than 100 corporate partners. They said the company will expand services to its corporate customers and enable employers to "attract, recruit and retain the best female talent."
Dive Insight:
FGB allows job seekers to review job listings and look up ratings for the companies they select, and the site is one of many recent initiatives aimed toward engagement of women in the workplace. Everything from co-working spaces to online match apps have emerged to cater to women and provide them with work resources or an inside-look at companies. The Wing, in particular, has come under scrutiny for its "women only" approach, however — and FGB was quick to point out that its services were free, "unlike some other female-focused career startups that charge fee-based memberships or event ticket sales."
In addition, employers should remain aware of the power of ratings websites and how their reputations and brands can attract or repel applicants. A 2017 Energage and kununu study found company ratings to be reliably accurate (though kununu is, notably, a site that provides company ratings). A separate study from CareerArc found that only 1 in 5 job-hunters would select a company with a poor rating as a potential place to work.
To gauge how their companies stack up as employers for women, recruiters should be able to respond positively to the questions Huang raised in her job hunt before founding FGB, like those on parental leave policies, work-life balance, the number of women in leadership roles, and the chances of a woman's career thriving in their work environment.