Dating app Bumble gives 700 employees paid week off to avoid ‘burn out’

The dating app has given its 700 staff members the time out after its billionaire founder ‘intuited’ a looming problem.

Bumble has given all its staff a paid week off work to stop its 700 employees from being “burnt out”.

The popular dating app, where women are in charge of making the first move, has shut all of its offices for the week and told staff to switch off and “focus on themselves”.

In April, the company announced “that all Bumble employees will have a paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June”.

A senior executive said founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, 31, had made the move “having correctly intuited our collective burnout”.

Clare O’Connor, Bumble’s head of editorial content, praised Wolfe Herd’s decision to take “a much-needed break” in a now-deleted tweet.

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A Bumble spokeswoman said the team had faced challenging times during the pandemic and they wanted employees to focus on themselves. Picture: AAP Image/David Crosling

On Monday, she wrote: “@WhitWolfeHerd gave all 700ish of us a paid week off, having correctly intuited our collective burnout. In the US especially, where vacation days are notoriously scarce, it feels like a big deal.”

A Bumble spokeswoman confirmed the week-long break, Mail Online reports.

She said, “Like everyone, our global team has had a very challenging time during the pandemic.

“As vaccination rates have increased and restriction have begun to ease, we wanted to give our teams around the world an opportunity to shut off and focus on themselves for a week.”

Staff will return to the office on June 28.

The female-led dating app, believed to have 100 million users worldwide, was hailed as a game changer in the world of online dating when it was launched seven years ago.

Wolfe Herd, from Salt Lake City in Utah, launched Bumble in 2014 with the tag line “by women, for women”, and she is one of the youngest female chief executives leading a public company.

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The female-led dating app founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd is believed to have 100 million users worldwide. Picture: Supplied

She previously worked for the development team for dating app Tinder, becoming vice president of marketing for the company.

But Wolfe Herd later sued the company, alleging that her co-founders subjected her to sexual harassment.

Tinder parent Match Group Inc, which denied the allegations, paid about $1 million to settle the dispute.

Wolfe Herd was named one of Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech in 2014 and one of Elle’s Women in Tech in 2016.

She was also named in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2017 and 2018, and Forbes’ top 100 “America’s richest self-made women” in 2020.

The company debuted on the US stock exchange in February with a valuation of $US1.6 billion ($2.1 million). Picture: Eric Baradat/AFP

Her wealth jumped from $US498 million to $US1.6 billion ($A660 million to $A2.1 billion) in February as her firm celebrated a successful first day on Wall Street.

She made headlines at the time by carrying her young son on the Nasdaq trading floor on the day her company went public.

The company continued to see strong growth since its IPO. The number of paid users across Bumble and Badoo, an international dating app that Bumble also owns, rose 30 per cent in the first quarter, compared with the same period a year prior, the company said last month.

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission