whose policies get regularly covered in the press, many firms say things like “we’re supportive of flexible work” but are “very sparse on details,” says Scoop CEO and co-founder Rob Sadow. “It felt like there is this disconnect between how important this topic was for job seekers and the marketplace and how little information was publicly available on it.”
Even if it also helps build Scoop’s business, hybrid work experts say the database offers a tool not currently available in the same form elsewhere. “This is, I think, the best data set I’m aware of on what firms are doing for their work-from-home and hybrid policies,” says Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who is an adviser to Scoop—and holds equity in the company—but whose monthlyon remote work trends is widely cited.
But job seekers shouldn’t rely on it as gospel quite yet. Of course, policy can differ from practice—how employees and their managers really behave when it comes to remote work can be a matter of culture, especially as people grow nervous about their jobs. And so far, much of the data is self-reported by workers or culled from public sources and not verified by employers.
Shah, who said in an email that Scoop is part of a new software category called “employee location management,” thinks as many CEOs wrestle with hybrid work, “we viewed that as a new, secular, global, gnarly problem.”