Just Eat: “We’re Going To Create The World’s Greatest Food Community”

You’ve probably used Just Eat when feeling a bit peckish, or, you’ve seen its branded signs proudly stationed in some of your favourite local restaurant or takeaway windows. Just Eat’s success has been built upon the value it places on hiring the right employees to drive the business forward. But, don’t just take it from us, its employees give it an average rating of 3.8/5 and consistently rate their senior management highly. With arguably one of the best graduate recruitment schemes around, it really is one of the most attractive employers in the jobs market today if you want to work for a disruptive tech company. We recently spent time with Lisa Hillier, Just Eat’s Chief People Officer, to find out how it has achieved such success in a relatively short period of time. Talk us through some of Just Eat's key objectives? Three of our main corporate objectives surround our Restaurant Partners, our customers and our internal talent. For our Restaurant Partners, our objective is to fundamentally to grow their business - our success is tied in with the their success and we’re incredibly proud of how we have been able to support independent and family-owned restaurants from day one. For our customers, our aim is to use every occasion to create happy, loyal customers, and make food discovery exciting for everyone. In everything we do, the customer is always at the front of our mind. It’s imperative for our continued success that we provide the best customer experience possible. Finally, creating the world’s greatest talent - I’m particularly passionate about this objective. We now have over 2,370 talented and passionate Just Eater’s across the globe and we’re committed to investing in the development of each and every employee, to ensure the long term success of the business and to create a high performing team. For those who don't know, what's the difference between what you do as opposed to Deliveroo or UberEats? Our vision is to create the world’s greatest food community, so we’re passionate about providing a global platform, for friends and families to enjoy and explore food. Our core business is bringing the best technology to our restaurants who already have delivery capabilities but who aren’t digitally connected to consumers. In 2016 we had almost 10 million UK app downloads, with over 17 million customers globally, ordering the food they really want. With more than 27,600 restaurant partners on our platform in the UK, and 68,500 worldwide, we have the deepest knowledge of restaurants, and ​a proven track record of helping to accelerate their growth whilst also improving standards. And ​we are pushing technology boundaries to provide our customers and restaurant partners with more choice and convenience, in exciting new ways. We’ve been established as the market leader in the UK for over a decade and are also in 13 countries across the globe. That experience and scale puts us in a unique position to provide the very best experience for both our customers and Restaurant Partners. How do you continue to innovate in such a crowded food delivery marketplace? Innovation has always been at the core of our business. We encourage everyone who works at Just Eat to constantly challenge themselves, bring new ideas forward, and think about how we can do things better. This is true for all our teams, but even more apparent when we look at our recent technological developments. In the last year we have become available on Apple Watch, Amazon Alexa, Xbox and we even started to deliver using robots…! Our partnership with Starship Technologies has been an amazing step for us, it’s enabled our Restaurant Partners to deliver orders at peak times across London. Let's talk a little about your workforce. How do you use Glassdoor to retain employees but also attract the very best talent? Glassdoor is a hugely important platform for us. It gives employees and former employees a place to voice their experience, and it provides us with invaluable feedback which, as a leader within the business, I take incredibly seriously. Feedback from Glassdoor occurs organically and so we know that it provides us with genuine insights which sometimes can be hard to achieve through internal initiatives. You do lots of work to recruit graduates and entry level employees. Why are they so important to the future of Just Eat? Talent is one of the key strategic endeavours that will guarantee Just Eat’s long term success. We’re passionate about investing in talent and creating a pipeline of individuals who we can support, train and grow to become future leaders within the business. The graduates that we’ve brought into the business have made a huge impact over the last 12 months, and that response has seen us double our graduate investment for 2017. We’ve actually just held our 2017 graduate assessment days and we’re really impressed with the standard of graduates we have attending. We are really excited to be adding to our graduate community, and to growing it year-on-year. What does a successful 2017 look like for you? We want to create the world’s greatest food community, and to achieve this we need to continue to make incremental gains and improvements in the services we provide to our customers and our Restaurant Partners. We’ll continue to innovate and develop our technology offering and invest heavily in our internal talent. If we deliver on these goals, it’ll move us closer to our overall objectives. Fancy working at Just Eat? Apply for jobs there now.