With a newly announced Customer Center of Excellence growing in Salt Lake City and a continued focus on product innovation, including the rollout of Castlight Care Guides, Castlight set ambitious goals for hiring and recruitment in 2019. We looked to round out our team with committed, creative employees who could help us capitalize on the strength of our technology and better serve our customers.

Beyond just finding exceptional talent in a tight job market, Castlight believes that our hiring and recruiting efforts should also bring diversity of thought, experience, and identity to our team. Castlight is proud to report that these efforts resulted in our reaching or exceeding every recruiting and hiring goal we set for the year, and share some of our successes below:

Attracting Diverse Talent

Last fall, CEO Maeve O’Meara signed the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion ™ pledge, committing to embed diversity and inclusion as central tenets of our hiring and management practice. Across all of Castlight’s hiring for 2019, more than half of our hires (53 percent) were women. While globally, women represent less than a third of those employed in research and development positions, 33 percent of Castlight’s new R&D hires in 2019 were female. Additionally, 22 percent of our new employees come from an underrepresented minority group, and hiring in this category improved across every Castlight location from 2018.

Recruiting efforts for our Salt Lake City Customer Center of Excellence focused especially on delivering across our diversity and inclusion commitments. Across 41 new hires in that office, which spanned the support, IT, and customer experience teams, 56 percent are women, and 34 percent represent a traditionally underrepresented minority group.

Hiring Efficiently

To rapidly build our team, a top goal for the company was to increase our average monthly hires in 2019. We set ourselves a monthly hiring target in order to bring together the best engineers, clinicians, designers, data analysts, and business minds. We ended up exceeding our hiring goals by 37 percent, and ended the year with total new hires up 17 percent from 2018. Our Salt Lake City Customer Center of Excellence accounted for almost 20 percent of our new hires last year.

We have found that building close partnerships between the recruitment and business arms of our company has led to more targeted recruiting, which results in candidates that better fit each team’s needs. In 2019, we had an 89 percent offer acceptance rate, which far exceeds the market average (74 percent).

Creating a Positive Candidate and Employee Experience

Castlight has worked hard to ensure that our candidates have a positive experience as they navigate our hiring process, and that our employees experience a supportive, collaborative culture once they are brought on board.

Because we had significant hiring goals to build our team in Salt Lake City, Castlight added onsite recruiting support in our Utah office to create a positive experience for candidates during the interview and hiring process. Company-wide, some of our most successful hiring in 2019 came from employee referrals, with 23 percent of overall hires being recommended by a current Castlight employee. This tells us that our employees are proud to work for Castlight, so much so that they have become some of our best hiring ambassadors in a tight job market. Additionally, 94 percent of the candidates we interviewed said they had a positive experience in post-interview surveys.

Though we are excited to see Castlight’s core values reflected in our recruiting and hiring achievements in 2019, we know that this work is never complete and will continue to hold ourselves accountable for creating a supportive, inclusive workplace as we grow in 2020. Our focus this year will be to continue our hiring pace and maintain gender diversity hiring at roughly 50/50 parity across Castlight, all while setting even more ambitious targets for adding to the diversity of our workforce. We believe building a team reflective of the diversity of our millions of users will improve our work in creating a better healthcare experience for everyone.