ApplyBoard Reviews

3.0

47% would recommend to a friend

(706 total reviews)
avatar

Meti Basiri

50% approve of CEO

34% positive business outlook

ApplyBoard has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 706 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The ApplyBoard employee rating is 22% below average for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

706 reviews
2.0
27 May 2020

Amazing people, horrible management

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I worked at the company for almost two years and saw it grow from 100 employees to more than 500. There are some really great people working on their teams. And there is a sense of small communities amongst different departments. Many times I asked for help from other teams and they were a delight to work with. Very hard working and kind.

Cons

The founders do not care about the people who work at the company. They pretend to but they have disrespected people (even loyal people who have been there for years). They will talk over people and yell at them in front of the whole company. Martin, the CEO, holds monthly "vision meetings" where he talks about himself for 2 hours. They are NOT transparent about anything. And when questioned they give politician answers. The company's moral was always polled post these meetings and it was always very low. People are scared to stand up to the brothers because they have seen them yell at their staff in demanding ways. Even after their staff have worked long hours for weeks. Management is a complete disaster. I was happy to see the founding brothers having mentors to help with how they talk to people but it's still not enough. The word around the company was that everyone hopes the investor board will kick Martin off. He's not trustworthy and they hire a bunch of management that is only there to please Martin. They don't care about their employees and will walk all over them. Like I said, I worked there for nearly 2 years and saw this daily. So much of their staff has a pay divide. The over pay a bunch of made-up titles for managers that don't actually do any work. Their customer experience team and software work double time. CX hardly gets the benefits for it since their pay is so low and their overtime hours only clock in after a couple hours. Three Labour Ministry even flagged them once for inappropriate working hours for their staff. The founders will not change or do anything for their employee benefit. When asked about better benefits and RSP matching, Martin replied that if they save on that "everyone will be rich." Which basically means him. They had almost 30 people leave the company in early 2020. HR tried to cover it up and told those people who were leaving that they couldn't say goodbye to their colleagues. It was all kept secret. Additionally, in multiple departments, there was employees who were harassed after giving their two weeks notice in. So much that the founders wouldn't stop calling them and making it seem as though they couldn't leave. I lost respect for this company. I have referred dozens of people in my network to this company, and I do not see the same respect given back to their team. Their investors need to take a closer look at how they are running their company.

1.0
6 Jun 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- You will learn a lot because you will be asked to do a lot - Definitely isn’t the place where everything is laid out, I found this as a positive thing as you get to experience a real “start-up” culture however make one mistake and you are quickly pointed out - Friendly co-workers across teams and lots of people are willing to help, however this culture will soon become obsolete with all the talent leaving and becoming exhausted with the current work environment - Save a trip to the mall cause you’ll be presented with a closet full of t-shirts - Kudos to the marketing team as our campaigns have garnered lots of engagement and this reflects in the current valuation of the company

Cons

- The pay is abysmal and far from competitive with any of the surrounding tech companies, “stock” and “valuation” is constantly preached by the execs - Pointing fingers is a weekly occurrence in engineering, even worse upper management is extremely toxic blaming individual contributors for their lack of knowledge surrounding pipelines and legacy code - Spaghetti/legacy code throughout all domains, a common phrase from developers is “it is the way it is”. Lots of hacky solutions within the code base that is either added because there is no code quality or simply pushed because of strict deadlines that never end up being refactored or looked back upon - The development, testing and production environments is extremely frustrating as there is a clear lack of documentation and engineering managers never seem to care, this leads individual contributors struggling to maintain environments while trying to contribute to actual features - Cross functionally, devops, domain teams and QA are extremely out of sync, QA may introduce a new testing pipeline that breaks all environments that no team is aware of - There are a couple of people that have been here in engineering for a long time and have deep knowledge of certain engineering principles but are shunned away from expressing their ideas as management is afraid to take risks. I’m honestly surprised that some have stayed for so long perhaps cause of the “stock” narrative that management constantly pushes - Lots of contributors (POs, PMs, Devs, Management) that communicate extremely well but are all talk when it comes to implementation - No growth/promotion opportunities, I have never seen someone in engineering get promoted other than those in management or already in higher positions however this may be because of the all talk no implementation aspect mentioned beforehand - Features that are worked on for months are not well thought and planned out, be expected to work on a project for several sprints to never see the light of day in a production environment - There are a couple of individuals that cling onto their title and use it as a authority - Starting to outsource work/projects to those overseas - Go on linkedin and ask any current engineer/developer about how great the "preprod" and "pumpkin" process is

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ApplyBoard Response
4y
Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and your feedback. We are continuously finding new ways to ensure we have a strong and competitive compensation package, which includes undergoing a market salary review across the company by a third party. We subsequently made salary market adjustments for hundreds of our team members after this detailed review. We have also recently allotted stock options to hundreds of team members around the world to help share in the successes of the overall organization. As a fast growing and adaptive organization, priorities are naturally going to shift from time to time and new processes that are in need of implementation. We are continuing to add new resources, new perspectives, and new processes to scale ApplyBoard not just for the next year, but the next ten years. Additionally, our growth has allowed for a great deal of internal promotions and movement across teams that are highlighted and celebrated each and every month in our internal newsletter. Some of our newest managers and team leads started in different roles within ApplyBoard and we are very proud of being able to provide these opportunities for so many extraordinary team members. Again, thank you for sharing and we appreciate the time you spent working with us.
1.0
27 Mar 2021

If you want to have a life don't work here

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I didn't see any - in the beginning the "brainwashing" worked for a bit but then the true colors came out....

Cons

The company does not care about their people. All the marketing materials presented on social media and LinkedIn to portray them as a caring company is only that – “marketing”. The caring stops at a bunch of shirts and pens they give you. The leadership team is lacking leadership skills, emotional intelligence and basic business skills such as awareness that you cannot swear, yell and insult people in meetings. They highly value people who are arrogant, aggressive and “get the work done” regardless of the price. The more aggressive you are, the more likely you are to be promoted, respected and valued. HR team keeps adding “leaders” giving you hope that things will be better but they all behave just like the extension of “brothers” and you as an employee feel abandoned. There is a zero trust from leaders and that creates the culture of “blame” and not focusing on solutions. They pride themselves on being “agile” but all that is is pretty much making decisions on the fly that are based on nothing creating a situation where number of managers and employees are totally misguided and at the end of the day if things don’t work out it is their fault and not leadership fault.

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Glassdoor has 773 ApplyBoard reviews submitted anonymously by ApplyBoard employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if ApplyBoard is right for you.