[deciplex]

Everyone tries to market themselves as being an employee-friendly place to work, even if (or maybe especially if) they aren't. It is very difficult for a candidate to separate signal and noise here. On the other hand, a salary is a salary. Anyone's primary motivation in working for your company is going to be the compensation - why are you pretending otherwise, and selecting for candidates who will play along with this pretense?

Where 'employee-friendliness' comes into the picture more is in retention and it can have a big impact there, since once a person is working for you they will know very quickly whether the employee-friendliness rhetoric is steeped in bullshit, or not. But it is not a very effective recruitment tool except perhaps with the very naive i.e. people just joining the job market.

[hassiktir]

Yep, I don't get why people act like being an "employee-friendly place to work" is a perk, I've never seen a job posting or had a recruiter contact me with "well we aren't a very good place to work, but we pay 2x above to compensate."

If anything, I think I've realized from my limited experience that companies who push how great their culture is are usually the ones with really high turnover and HR is being pressured into creating an environment (on job sites and screening) that new dev's want to work at.