if you are friends of someone you will be promoted - Anonymous employee Booking.com Employee Review

Hiya and thanks for your feedback. Clearly, I'm disappointed with your rating and the headline. There's not a lot of detail in your comments, however, as you will be aware we recently ran out Your Voice engagement survey. Over the last week or so myself and the Leadership team have been looking at the results and comments. I don't believe for a minute that "if you are friends of someone you will be promoted" in the last 18 months there have been nearly 400 internal promotions, that's a lot of opportunity and you'd need a lot of friends. However, in the Your Voice feedback it is clear we have an issue with how colleagues view our internal recruitment processes. We only got the results last week but we have already started to look at this and I promise that this is on our list of actions following the survey. Unfortunately, this does not mean that everyone will get every internal job they apply for. We recently had a job where we had 32 applicants for 1 role. The role went to an internal candidate but that meant 31 disappointed internal candidates. I love the fact that so many people want to progress in our business but in this scenario there can only be 1 appointment as I have said this is very much on our agenda and i hope that you see the changes coming through over the months ahead. Many thanks Ryan.