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Joining the Band

Ideas drive us, not bureaucracy

Typical corporate career paths with ladders, hierarchies, and bureaucracy? You have heard us soundboard this before in our blog – bureaucracy and hierarchy is just not our way. We don’t believe in up or out. We don’t believe in rest and vest. We want to give you the opportunity to grow with us. Neither your career nor Spotify is a sprint, they’re both marathons. 

The best people in their field may not be the best people for our band. We learned this the hard way. We put an emphasis on finding the right people every time, rather than just recruiting the rock stars. In our hiring process, we look for three essential factors: adaptability, ability, and drive. We’ve discovered that great performances come from the right people, all working collaboratively toward a shared goal. Daring to be value driven makes us sure of the fact that proud people perform. As a team, we are our mission.

Who we’re looking for

Our band is dependent on all of its members to give and get the full experience. If you’re one of us we rely on you to help bring our values to life in real time, to discuss them openly with your team and work together to integrate them into your work.

If you join Spotify, we expect you to care – about your work, about Spotify, about the success of the entire band. You should take ownership for the work you do and take pride in what you deliver, both individually and as a team. 

If you join Spotify, we expect you to grow. Growth is our mantra, both for Spotify and for our people. The two go hand in hand. You should be self-driven, ready to take control of your own development and reach your full potential. We can’t guarantee that you’ll get a promotion and a new title every six months but we can help you design your future. So you should be ready to expand your skills and learn new ones. You should want to make conscious and deliberate decisions about what your journey will be.

If you join Spotify, we expect you to nurture collaboration and just, well, be nice. Remember: listening is everything. In our band, we have no patience for entitled egos.

Playing in sync

So – no egos. Got that. But what else goes into “being nice”? Well, we treat all of our colleagues, users, creators, and partners with respect. We assume good intent and work hard to achieve mutual understanding. We recognize that we all bring our own unique perspectives to the table and that with those perspectives may come some unconscious biases. So while we have the confidence to voice our opinions, we also have the humility to listen and learn from others. 

Here at Spotify, we’re dedicated to fostering a workplace free from discrimination and a culture built on the principle of inclusion. We strongly believe that a diversity of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds will lead to a better environment for our employees and a better product for our users and creators. Think about it, without a diversity of instruments, a band’s output would be pretty boring. (There’s a reason why your favorite band isn’t just five tubas playing at once.) Music is global and so Spotify should be too.

We believe in an inclusive culture where everyone feels empowered to share their full selves, where everyone feels like they belong. A culture where innovative, passionate, and playful people can grow, have fun, and do their best work. A culture that develops and deepens with every new team member but always stays true to our core values.

These are some pretty bold and ambitious statements. They open up for criticism, right? But the opposite would be impossible. We are not getting it right all the time, but we will eventually, with constructive feedback and by holding ourselves accountable for a stance and a workplace we all want to be an active part of creating, developing and iterating on. Change is our constant and our culture is in a constant state of change. 

You can read more about how we roll in The Band Manifesto

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