Will your boss match Netflix’s yearlong paid leave?

Netflix seeks to boost employee benefits by offering “unlimited” paid time off to married staff during their first year as new parents.

“Netflix’s continued success hinges on us competing for and keeping the most talented individuals in their field”, Netflix’s chief talent officer Tawni Cranz said in a blog announcement.

“Experience shows people perform better at work when they’re not worrying about home”, Cranz stated.

Netflixs move, announced Tuesday, set a new standard even among Silicon Valleys famously generous companies. At the Hacker Lab in Sacramento, Bryan Barton, who works out of the co-working space, said he thinks companies use parental leave as a way to draw in new employees.

This year President Barack Obama ordered federal agencies to offer their employees six weeks of paid parental leave.

After it bumped its maternity leave from 12 weeks to 18 weeks, Google said new mothers were leaving the company at half the rate they did previously. Hence, the chances of the company wanting to hire men instead of women, for the fact that women would end up taking a year-long leave, gets minimized.

Granted, many startups are in similar positions as PaperG with young employees and a maternity leave policy isn’t necessary. Top tech firms are among the leaders in offering greater benefits to attract new talent. They’ll likely be encouraged to improve their own parental leave policy, or offer more competitive benefits in other areas. The company was researching maternity leave policies when an employee became pregnant, which was a first for the then 5-year-old company.

In a blog post on their website, Netflix stated that the policy was intended to allow new moms and dads to easily balance the needs of growing families without worrying about their job or incomes.

Some experts actually suggest having a generous vacation policy as opposed to unlimited time out, say five weeks vacation time or a specific amount of maternity leave. Mothers can also take up to two weeks of leave prior to giving birth “to manage the physical impact that often comes with late pregnancy and to prepare for the upcoming birth”, the company writes in a statement.

If a company does offer paid leave, it’s usually about 12 weeks – nothing close to what Netflix plans.