Open sourcing Sparksuite’s employee handbook

Although headquartered in The Woodlands (near Houston), Sparksuite aims to be one of the leading software companies in Texas. That requires attracting the very best talent and competing with job markets like Austin and Dallas (and to some degree, nationally).

To that end, we’ve decided to follow several other tech companies’ leads and open source our employee handbook. We reviewed handbooks across a variety of industries while crafting our own version. Some focused on documenting every detail about how their company operates; some on company culture and values; and some on employment policies.

Drawing from all of these, our employee handbook offers a glimpse into what it’s like to work for our company and what benefits go along with that. It’s also clear about expectations and serves as a reference for people operations policies.

Our intent is for the handbook to be as valuable to prospective employees as it is to current employees. Particularly for applicants, this kind of transparency eliminates a degree of unknowns typically faced before an offer letter is given. Mentions of “great benefits” turn into clear details, allowing potential applicants to make more informed decisions.

Of course, it’s our hope that these interested applicants will be attracted by the exceptional benefits we offer and the values our company promotes. Publishing our employee handbook ought to highlight the ways in which we stand out from the crowd.

To allow people to review changes over time, and to let other companies build off of what we’ve published, our employee handbook is stored on GitHub with the CC0 1.0 Universal license.

If we seem like the type of company you’d want to work for, we may be hiring! Check out our careers page for more information.