CT Reviews

4.3

85% would recommend to a friend

(260 total reviews)

Joel Gross

85% approve of CEO

81% positive business outlook

CT has an employee rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 260 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The CT employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Media and communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

260 reviews
1.0
20 Nov 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The only good reason to work at Coalition Technologies would be the opportunity to work remotely and the great people you work with.

Cons

The owner Joel Gross is a micro-manager who sets very unreasonable timelines and goals. He is temperamental and allows his moods to affect how he treats his team and employees. He is cheap and only wants to hire people remotely because of the low price but looks down on people who are non-native speakers. He feels like his employees owe him because he hired them. The recruitment process is tedious. You are also not screened for the role that you applied for. You may apply for office assistant but would be hired as an account manager or sales assistant or telemarketer or accounting assistant. He allows people to work remotely with a time tracking tool that takes your photos every 9 minutes. Those who work at the office also has cameras trained on them. You also need to account for your time EVERY DAY by completing a task sheet (what you did and how many minutes it took you to do it). You are also given feedback by your manager on how you used up your day and you should also give feedback to the feedback given by your manager. You are not allowed to speak to your coworkers or chat if it's not work-related. He does not pay his employees or contractors when they resign or leave and reneges on benefits or increases he promised when he hired people. He goes on a hiring and firing wave at least 2x a year not because business is unstable, but more because he does not know how to manage the team and the resources he has at hand. He would fire managers or those with high salaries but would not hire replacements. He is unreasonable to the point of forcing you to meet a deadline on huge task even if the application to be used for it is down. I don't know if the conditions have improved, but I would advise against anyone who would like to work here. And all the positive reviews are fake. When I was there the CEO would ask us to write good reviews to counter the bad review the company gets.

avatar
CT Response
8y
Hi- I don't know who you are, although if you actually worked with CT we undoubtedly spoke with one another. My name is Jordan and I've worked at CT for the last seven plus years and have helped it grow to what it is today. If you are a real ex-employee- Thanks for taking the time to write the review. While I think a lot of what you said is at best an exaggeration and is at worst, a lie, there are some good opportunities for improvement (And perhaps areas that we have improved on already). We no longer use tasks sheets (and haven't since 2015 or 2016, which would mean your review is not really relevant to today's CT anyways). We continue to use Basecamp and other software solutions to help identify project and task priorities for individual team members, which is a necessity for any business. We do continue to use Time Doctor, and it continues to be a valuable tool in helping us assess productivity and focus during the work day. We have put greater emphasis on focusing on objective measurement of productivity and less emphasis on subjective measurements of productivity (like how often you have personal conversations with co-workers). We do continue to offer great remote work opportunities and have a fantastic team of co-workers and leaders who support individuals looking to challenge themselves and grow professionally. We do continue to extend job offers to skilled individuals for roles they may be a better fit for. We do not force people into roles they did not interview for (each person interviewing is given tests for specific roles / positions to evaluate their fit, and if one isn't a good fit, but we feel you have talent, we may ask you if you'd be willing to apply for a different role). None of those are negatives - they give CT a competitive advantage and allow us to grow in an increasingly challenging industry. There are a number of factual inaccuracies I wanted to address- 1) The positive reviews being fake. This claim is repeated by a number of dishonest reviewers, possible competitors or ex-employees with an ax to grind. While I can appreciate someone expressing their opinion about a negative experience, claims like this are inaccurate. How do I know? Reading through many of these reviews, I see lots of positive feedback and valid opportunities for our collective improvement from people I can guess I've worked with over the years. Someone leaving a positive review doesn't make it a fake, any more than you making negative comments make your claims real or legitimate. 2) Looking down on non-native speakers. Many of our team members are non-native speakers. Non-native speakers hold many leadership positions in our company, including over native speakers. We continue to actively seek, hire, promote, and competitively compensate non-native speakers. Unlike many other tech companies, we have outstanding diversity in nearly every demographics category and will continue to, because we prioritize talent, not native speaking capability or place of birth or other non-productivity related factors in our hiring. 3) We do not having 'hiring and firing waves'. We try and consistently hire for positions where talented team members are needed, and when team members prove unwilling to improve or incapable of doing their job, they may be terminated. I'm confident most team members who have experience in the work force would find Coalition's approach to personnel evaluation desirable compared to other alternatives- we give you clear metrics to focus on, the tools and team members to achieve them, and we provide transparent reporting on how you're doing as a productive team member. That approach limits politics, and other unfairness in the workplace. Whoever you are, and where ever you've gone, I sincerely hope you're on to great things. Jordan B. President and COO
1.0
23 Jul 2016

Poor Experience

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The employees, aside from management, are overall wonderful to work with.

Cons

To put it plainly, working at Coalition Technologies was a very negative experience. Joel, Coalition's CEO, treats his employees very poorly. Micromanagement is to an extreme: computers are recorded, a record of daily tasks must be submitted by employees, and tasks are then "graded" by managers to monitor performance. The computers' webcams are also running to record employees. Suffice it to say, Joel has no trust or respect for his employees. Joel hires entry level employees who have very little experience and uses this to his advantage. Employees are hired in with titles like "Office Assistant" or "Digital Producer Trainee," given minimum wage salaries, and then are burdened with the work of a full fledged account manager or web developer. This of course also is a disservice to the Coalition's clients, as their accounts are put in the hands of employees who are undertrained and overburdened with an incredible amount of work. Suffice it to say, this is the company entry level employees are warned about. Joel's unpredictable moods, poor business acumen, and basic lack of respect for others makes it plain that Coalition Technologies is not a business with much long term promise. Also, yes, the positive reviews are fake. I'm sure in a couple days there will be a post following this one about what an exciting workplace CT is and how if you didn't like it you must have not liked to work very hard. But that's basically Coalition in a nutshell.

1.0
1 Feb 2016

The Lower The Stars - The More True The Review

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The team there is hard-working and mostly everyone gets along marvelously. The co-workers were by far the greatest part of the job. There are some lessons to be learned as with any experience - my new job seemed like such a breeze because "at least this isn't Coalition!"

Cons

If you want to get the real answers and the honest opinions - search reviews low to high when dealing with this company. SO MANY of the positive reviews are fake and paid for by the CEO himself (this is a service the company actually provides called "reputation management"). I can tell you honestly that every single negative review is a true statement to the nature of Coalition Technologies, and not much has changed over the years spanning the reviews. Joel Gross is a smart and very talented salesman, but when it comes to understanding people and managing them - there is so much room for improvement. It was in this job that I finally learned the true meaning of micro-management. No one is trusted to do their work - you are required to record every minute of every day in a program, team leads are to give you feedback on how you spent your time, then you are to give feedback on your feedback to show that you have read it. This is just one of the many time-wasting ideas the CEO came up with to track every single move you make while at work. He would take the happiest and most encouraging team member on a walk to have a chat with them about how their moral isn't high enough. He would give speeches about how you "should just act happy, even if you aren't because then maybe you will convince yourself that you are happy." If you ever disagreed with him or spoke up about something you think should be changed (especially any of his ideas) he would accuse you of not backing him up and not being loyal to the company. You are pushed into jobs you do not want to do - with everyone being so intensely overworked (while also having to keep a detailed record of your work + take quizzes on every single weekly meeting) - people who were hired as office assistants end up being accountants. If you were 5 minutes late (even though you stayed an hour later after work the night before) you would be emailed or passive aggressively G-chatted. He actually asked people to take attendance for him when he was on vacation. There is no respect for the employees, there is no appreciation for the work they do, and there are no morals. Almost all remote employees worked over 40 hours every week with no thanks, it was simply expected. Everything and everybody is undervalued by the CEO. His biggest concern is money and he thinks if you're talking to a coworker for 5 minutes in the kitchen, you're trying to cheat him. Almost every single lunch was spent complaining and venting to your coworkers because every single one of us felt it. It was draining and miserable getting up to go to this toxic environment of a job. When you find out one of your coworkers is quitting, you're happy for them because at least they got out. Honestly, SEO is a dying breed anyways, you're better off working for McDonalds (they'll last longer).

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