Once upon a time, Zillow was a startup, but has now become the leading real estate and rental marketplace with more than 3800 employees across multiple offices. The company has learned that it’s not so easy to ensure that every single employee follows the company’s core values. It’s probably that biggest challenge that any startup faces when scaling up its business operations. How do you maintain the culture and bring to life your company’s core values when you dramatically increase your head count, promote to management roles high performing employees that have never led a team before; and reinforce that sense of belonging and cohesiveness when things are going 100mph?

Rebekah Bastian is Vice President of Community & Culture at Zillow Group. Rebekah was one of Zillow's first employees, coming over from Microsoft in 2005, and spent her first 12 years leading product development across many areas of the company. As VP of Community & Culture, she is leading Zillow Group’s initiatives around equity & belonging, cultural engagement, and social impact products. Her teams have the goal of creating the space and opportunities for all our employees to bring their full selves to the table, and ensure that Zillow is fully leveraging the diverse backgrounds, passions and skills of its employees to achieve great results and to enrich its internal and external communities.

Today with Rebekah we talk about:
- What she learned on the product side that helps her in your current role.
- What her team does to support the company’s mission.
- What lessons Zillow learned along the way by scaling up the company and the culture.
- How the company brings its well identified core values to life day after day.
- How Zillow is different when it comes to bridging the gender gap.
- How Zillow makes its employer brand standout in a very competitive talent market.

Note: you can follow Rebekah on LinkedIn and Zillow on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

This episode is brought to you by Spring International. Spring is a woman-owned boutique firm that focuses on performance-based employee engagement and people analytics. From onboarding to exit, Spring uses proven techniques to help companies improve the employee experience and calculate the ROI of HR programs and initiatives.
Spring can help you on your human capital analytics journey – visit their website at www.springitl.com or email [email protected].

If you want to send me feedback, suggestions for future topics or guests, you can reach me at [email protected] or on Twitter @eX_Summit. 

Thanks for listening.

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