2007 Best Companies to Work For

We attended the prestigious “100 Best Companies to Work For” awards yesterday evening, hosted by Washington CEO Magazine. We did not win, but we were delighted to be there as a Top 100 finalist. Let me provide some background…

Last year, we applied and failed to make the final cut into a highly competitive field of top 100 employers. So during this past March, after a particularly challenging time for the company, we were understandably not overly optimistic about our chances. In fact, our greater concern was not about achieving finalist status, but rather whether our staff might think that the leadership was in la-la-land applying for an award like this, which required our staff to fill out detailed satisfaction surveys. In the end, we still decided to apply, not necessarily to qualify as a top 100 finalist, but because we figured that at very least we would obtain some free and valuable employee survey data to help us manage the company as well as possible for the rest of the year. At all times, we were pretty much resigned to receiving some very tough survey feedback and had no designs on winning.

So it was a huge surprise when we learned that this year, during what was one of our darkest periods after the layoff, we made the cut as a finalist company. Woo hoo! Who would ever have expected that? What a resilient culture we have at WhitePages.com. Thanks to everyone on the team for making this such a great place! We may do better in the future, but I will always remember our strong showing this year given the unique circumstances.