I witnessed deceptive and unprincipled practices by upper management and HR on numerous occasions. In particular, Built In's regular practice of bribing people who are leaving to sign a non-disparagement agreement in order to get severance pay should stop you—a person reading Glassdoor reviews—in your tracks. I refused to sign, even though they offered me a month's salary to do so, which is why I am legally able to leave this review. Think about all the people who got laid off (1/4 of their workforce in fall 2022 alone) who needed that money and decided to sign. You're not hearing from them here, which radically juices the company's ratings as an employer. Core values are not taken seriously by leadership. I regularly tried to lead with solutions by "poking holes and offering ideas to patch them up," as they like to say, and was told to put my head down and keep these thoughts to myself. Even easy-to-implement fixes that everyone could agree on were regularly sidelined due politics or personalities. People who don't take the hint here are asked to resign or laid off at the first opportunity. Content leaders don't believe in the expertise of content creators and do not want them to "do more." Despite being told when I was hired that they were looking for someone who would bring new ideas, strategies and processes to the team, they really wanted a cog in a machine who would shovel content through the mill, not someone interested in raising—or even maintaining—quality or standards. DEI at Built In is all talk and no action. As a hiring manager, I struggled to diversify our very homogeneous team, but the candidate pool was very white and male in every one of the 9 or so hires I was directly involved in. I asked HR for help in expanding this pool and they refused, telling me I needed to come up with my own strategies to expand the applicant pool because they were too busy to offer support. Several candidates of color made it to the final round, only to be denied by leaders or HR for not passing the personality test they make candidates take or not having the right disposition, look or "culture fit." In fact, it was an open secret (on my team, at least) that HR is pretty much useless after you're onboarded. Every time I reached out with a "people team" issue, HR would take days or weeks to even respond. I repeatedly had to follow up on my own emails just to get a response! The eventual reply was usually to cut and paste sections of the handbook (that I'd obviously already read) or send URLs to outside advice articles (that they'd already asked managers to read). Then they would schedule follow-up meetings with me to see what I had done to fix the issue on my own, filling up my already stuffed calendar with garbage check-ins to clear themselves of accountability. I've literally never had to deal with a less valuable HR group in my nearly two decades in the professional workforce. I witnessed first-hand multiple occasions of the content studio team being undermined or stabbed in the back by petty managers and leaders on the news team and thrown under the bus by a leaderless sales team. I personally tried to create bonds between these teams to create some empathy between them, but eventually gave up in disgust.
