Employee spotlight pages are a diversity box-check, typically

Nate Guggia, who has strong content around employer branding and what potential candidates really want from jobs, wrote a post recently about how “employee spotlight” pages — you know the drill — are a waste of money. They absolutely are, but they’re also considered the gold standard of “recruitment marketing,” whatever that means. Nate’s argument, which is valid for sure, is that the pages are often boring as hell. You meet some sales manager and he says he “likes the challenges” of the work. It’s like 1-2 sentence answers. You know this dude likes the comp and bennies, or he likes the fine-ass tail down the hall in HR, or he likes the fact that he can be offline most of the day if he manages 2-3 deals through the pipeline, but on the page he says “It’s never the same thing! We love the challenges! We embrace them as a team!”

Yawn.

Here’s the other reason these pages are often a joke: they are a diversity and inclusion box-check, designed to show you that the company has African-American employees, Indian employees, and (GASP!) female employees, including (GASP!) females in engineering roles. It’s designed to get you to say “Damn, this place seems progressive.” In reality, those people might hate their jobs, they might be actively shopping themselves, they might be gone 2.5 weeks after the page goes live, etc. You don’t know the story. These pages are the same deal as a case study — they are designed to make something look good, i.e. the company, but in both cases you know the company created the asset, so what are they going to do? Make themselves look like incompetent pieces of shit that only hire white guys from 12 schools? Of course not. It’s all an ecosystem designed to make you think the problems aren’t there, whereas 15 seconds of thought at an IQ over 60 would get you to “Oh, this probably isn’t the full reality of this place.”

Diversity and inclusion are very complex, emotional topics for many employee-age people, and that’s only gotten more pronounced in the last seven-to-ten years. If you want to actually showcase that you have a diverse and inclusive company, talk about team composition, talk about projects completed, talk about how people bond inside and outside of work, show a fucking baseball game picture where everyone is holding a toddler, give me a video or two of two clearly-different people truly discussing what they did to get a product out, etc, etc. These employee spotlights, much like a lot of diversity vendor work, is inherently a bit performative.