Magoosh Company Blog

Category: Magoosh Philosophy

  • Magoosh’s Diversity Goals

    A few years ago, we took a look in the mirror and realized that our team was not representative of our student base and that our products do not yet equitably serve all students. That’s why, in 2018, Magoosh set up our first employee diversity goals. Today, I want to share a little bit about…

  • The Journey Ahead for Our Racial Justice Work — A Letter from the CEO of Magoosh

    Here at Magoosh, we’ve been outraged and heartbroken along with the rest of the world these past few weeks. We’ve been processing this internally as a team, and wanted first to be thoughtful in our support of one another—especially our Black colleagues—before drafting a response beyond our initial statement. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Tony McDade.…

  • COVID-19: Working through the new normal

    Given that COVID-19 is on everyone’s minds right now, especially our extended Magoosh family —our prospective candidates, students, employees— we wanted to share how Magoosh has responded from an operations perspective during this crisis. We have been lucky enough to be in a financial position to weather this storm and support our communities as we…

  • Away They Go: Introducing Paid Sabbaticals At Magoosh

    Although I now work in operations, finance and HR, I started my career as a public school teacher in Washington, DC. Towards the end of my five-year teaching career, I started to really dread going to work. Teaching is a hard and demanding job, and it was taking its toll on me emotionally. (Note: this…

  • No, You Don’t Have to Be A UX Researcher to Conduct a (Good) User Interview

    Small startup with no UX Researcher on staff? Here’s why user interviews are worth doing anyway – and tips on how to get started. Spend enough time in startup land and you’ll stumble upon one of the holy commandments of SaaS (software as a service) businesses: Thou Shalt Talk to Your Users Early and Often.…

  • We (Still) Don’t Negotiate Salaries – Here’s Exactly How We Make It Work.

    Specific steps we’ve taken over the past five years to promote equal pay using a no-salary negotiation policy. Nearly five years ago, I wrote about how we don’t negotiate salaries as a means of fostering fairness across our company and taking tangible steps to reduce wage gaps that are unfortunately inherent in the tech sector.…

  • Want to Hire the Best Candidates? Add Salary Ranges to Your Job Descriptions

    Here’s how we’ve approached equal pay through salary transparency, and how you can too. What would happen if all salaries at your company became public today — everyone found out what everyone else was paid? Would an employee be upset to learn that they were being paid less than their peers of equal experience? Would…

  • Two Marketers Retake the SAT: A Product Experiment

    How we’re building customer empathy and improving our SAT prep product by putting ourselves in our students’ shoes. When you picture the average SAT test taker, an image of a stressed-out teenager likely comes to mind. And yet, here we are, two woefully unprepared thirty-somethings who will be sitting for the Official SAT exam on…

  • #MoreThanAScore: Our Magoosh Take on the College Board’s Move Towards “Adversity Scores”

    At Magoosh, we believe that students are more than a score. Following their announcement to start using “adversity scores” to measure the socioeconomic position of SAT takers, we commend the College Board for acknowledging how systematically unfair the college admissions landscape can be to students from marginalized backgrounds and for taking steps, as a leader…

  • How to Reduce Biases When Giving Raises

    A star employee walks into your office with another job offer in hand, and asks for a raise. Would you give them one? We wouldn’t. At Magoosh, we make every effort to avoid a situation like the one above, but we don’t negotiate on salary. Bhavin, our CEO, already wrote about our rationale here. Now…