The best employer

Everyone in Southwest Florida knows Arthrex is one of the best places to work.

But outside the region and its industry, few people know just how good Arthrex employees have it. Free catered lunches for all workers, company paid health insurance with an onsite clinic staffed by a doctor and a free trip anywhere for you and your family after five years of service are just a few of the gee-whiz perks. Turnover is less than 2% annually, the company says.

The rich benefits are just a part of the reason Fortune magazine ranked Arthrex as one of the 100 best places to work last year. The list included heavyweights such as Google, Whole Foods Market and accounting firm KPMG.

“Some of our employees were asking why we weren't on this list,” recalls Lindsay Horne, compensation and benefits manager for Arthrex. “We're as good if not better than these people.”

But getting on Fortune's best-places-to-work list isn't as simple as sharing a list of benefits. The company that compiles the list for Fortune, Great Place to Work, performs in-depth employee surveys that measure organizational trust with 58 questions and conducts a cultural audit of the company that includes details on the workforce such as gender and ethnicity, turnover rates and the ratio of applicants to open positions. “It's no small endeavor,” says Horne.

But the positive results of the effort immediately put the company on the radar for top talent. Since Arthrex first made the list last year, it's often a conversation starter in recruiting interviews, says Connie Byrne, Arthrex's recruiting manager. “We did see a spike in visits to our website,” she says.

Arthrex is a Naples-based manufacturer of surgical tools for orthopedic surgeons. But like many fast-growing companies, it needs to hire top professionals from unrelated industries, such as accounting and analytics. “This designation gives us an additional platform,” Byrne says.

And Arthrex now is on the map for top talent from anywhere in the country. “We're very well known in Southwest Florida, but not as much nationally,” Byrne says.

The other advantage of the best places to work list is it helps attract young talent back to the region. “One of the things we're trying to do is to attract talent who grew up here and bring them back,” Byrne says. “They know there's a place to come back to.”

In addition to being named to the 100 best places to work list, Arthrex also was recognized as one of the 100 best places to work for millennials.

The millennial generation prizes experience over material things, Horne says. “Millennials stress the work-life balance more,” he says. “Giving them experience is a huge thing.”

Among millennials, Arthrex's trip of a lifetime perk is “one of the reasons we get the wow factor,” Horne says. Every five years, employees and their dependents are eligible for a company paid vacation to a destination of their choice plus an extra 40 hours of paid time off for the trip.

To recruit millennials, Arthrex is working on publicizing that travel perk. Some of the trips have been exotic, such as African safaris. “We started collecting stories from employees and promoting that with social media,” says Lisa Gardiner, the communications manager for Arthrex.

Look out for the Fortune list again in the spring. “We applied last summer for the 2016 list,” says Horne. “We should hear in March.”

TIPS
•Best employer lists are great recruiting tools.

•Experiences matter to millennials.

•Promote employee success on social media.

•Look for hometown talent.

Follow Jean Gruss on Twitter @JeanGruss