Ceres Reviews

3.3

50% would recommend to a friend

(69 total reviews)

Mindy S. Lubber

65% approve of CEO

40% positive business outlook

Ceres has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 69 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Ceres employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufacturing industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

69 reviews
1.0
5 Apr 2023

Toxic

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great mission. Talented and dedicated co-workers.

Cons

Top-down, hierarchical, hypocritical leadership (they do NOT walk the talk, but they talk a lot about doing so). Cliques of power/influence. Junior staff thrown under the bus repeatedly. Dishonest assessments of work performance once it become convenient to do so for higher-ups. HR worse than useless to address toxic workplace concerns. "Burn 'em and churn 'em" ethos. Unless you can come in at senior, SENIOR levels, don't do it to yourself.

3.0
21 Aug 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

A group of dedicated colleagues who truly care about the mission Strong work-life balance and boundary-setting (e.g., no emails on weekends) Good PTO including summer week off and Christmas-New Years week off

Cons

Chief People and Diversity Officer is retaliatory, vengeful, and disrespectful. She leads a bloated and ineffective HR team with 8 staff for a small org of ~150 people, yet the team fails to deliver on basic staff needs around education and equity. In a recent round of layoffs, no one from the HR team was laid off despite multiple staff with non-mission critical roles who have virtually empty calendars without meetings. There is no uptake in educational and DEI programming, yet programmatic staff were instead given the ax. Virtually all executive level staff and senior management are failing at their responsibilities to the board. They are very well paid despite being tired and ineffective at their jobs. Through their inertia and inability to consider new ideas and empower lower-level staff with creative thinking, they are driving the organization into the ground. They are failing to adopt new ideas, forcing high performing staff to resign for other organizations, laying off critical staff members, and ruining staff morale. Many, perhaps most, team program directors need to be laid off and replaced with younger staff who bring new ideas and energy. The CPDO, CFAO, CDO and CPO all need to be replaced with new blood to avoid the inertia and old school mentality that is expediting the collapse of an organization that is becoming ineffective and failing to advance its mission. The CEO is a lovely human, but it is far past time for her to resign and bring in someone with the stamina and ideas to take Ceres back on track.

3.0
29 Nov 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I think the theory of change and strategies we use are very exciting. People are caring, thoughtful, and motivated to address very urgent problems in a practical and inspiring way. Colleagues including some superiors take an active interest in my well-being. The org's recent growth means opportunities abound to lead interesting projects.

Cons

Ceres is a complex organization with many teams using different strategies. This complexity is what makes it effective, but as the org grows ever faster (the staff has approximately doubled from 2018 to end 2022) it leads to dysfunction and growth of bureaucracy. Staff are often frustrated with HR's hiring and promotion processes. It is very possible to overwork — in a recent survey approximately half of all employees are experiencing some level of burnout — yet some people are underutilized and it's hard to understand how certain positions add value. Progress on DEI is slower than desired. Culture and morale have not recovered from the pandemic. Leadership seems aware of these issues and tries to address them but does not appear to be keeping up. You can still thrive here, but approach with reasonable caution.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 69 Reviews

Glassdoor has 102 Ceres reviews submitted anonymously by Ceres employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Ceres is right for you.