Employ (MA) Reviews

Lever’s go-to-market teams (Sales, Marketing, CS) have the highest attrition rates I’ve seen in 12+ years. Don't take my word — look at the data. On my Lever team (30 ppl total) we lost 44% the last 6 months — only 2 were involuntary. Why are so many Leveroos leaving? Sure, Lever's pay is usually lower than market (I received a 20% pay increase upon leaving, and have less responsibility/work). But the vast majority departed for reasons much more complicated. I'll try to simplify: 1) Lever’s business model is failing; they’re cash-strapped. Spend is high (even by tech standards) — paired with 7+ quarters of missed revenue targets. Even after repeatedly lowering quarterly goals, Lever’s unit economics are very very poor. 2) As a result, understandably, executive leadership has made increasingly panicked decisions: deferring all raises/ promos til cash-flow improves, rescinding candidate offers 1-2 days before candidates start, rushing to merge teams/consolidate without a plan or reason. All of which is understandable when you’re working for a struggling business. But what ultimately got many to leave is 3) exec leadership has panicked to the point of compromised competency and integrity: rescinding promises made to employees about working arrangements, promotions, departmental changes; making brash but important decisions related to people's employment without using any data, going back on their word (regularly); throwing other employees under the bus and outwardly scape-goating. Worst of all is the blanket of tension and blame that ricochets across the office each day. I've seen executive-level leaders engaging in all-out rage-filled interactions towards subordinates with screaming, red-faced meetings containing abusive and unproductive verbal content — regularly and seemingly without aim (!!!!). I've never seen anything like it in my career before or after. At first it was unbelievable. And then, tragic that this has been normalized. Ultimately, it was realizing Lever’s panic-stricken work environment had crossed the line into all-out toxic (my partner and friends coming forth one by one with increasing concern), that ultimately caused me to leave. Most of my colleagues have echoed the same concerns: working at Lever was becoming damaging. Not all teams share the same experience, and it’s not unanimously a bad decision to join Lever, or a company in this precarious financial situation. As anywhere, there are good executives/leaders, and great teams/pockets within Lever. But please do research beyond what’s written online to make an educated decision. Here are some suggestions for those engaging in an interview process with Lever. (A) Ask your interviewer (better-yet, ask ALL your interviewers): - What is the department’s attrition rate? - What is the specific team’s attrition rate? Why? (If your interviewer does not know, ask them to work it out with you, in the moment, over the past 6-9 months, by taking a quick tally of who left and how big the team was) - Can you list why each of the last 3-4 people left, and how recently? - What is the hardest thing facing the company right now? What are the consequences / risks of this? - If your options were up for purchasing tomorrow, would you buy them? Walk me through your logic in detail. - If you could change anything about Lever / working at Lever what would it be? (B) And above all else: backchannel. backchannel. backchannel. Look up someone (2-3 someones!) on a team similar to yours that is no longer at Lever — there are plenty. Ask them to chat with you about their experience, I’m confident many of them would be happy to — Lever hires (mostly) lovely people! This way, you can enter the organization with a fuller picture and eyes wide open. Too many candidates get bait-and-switched by all the marketing noise. Take care and stay woke, people. <3

I have been a manager in the post-sales organization at Employ for a few years. If you are the kind of person who wants to feel excited about the direction of your company or supported by leadership, DO NOT work at Employ. However, if you are someone who wants to show up, do what you are told to do, and then go live your life, Employ might be a really good fit for you. For me, Employ is a bad fit largely due to how the company is run. The C-Suite makes every decision without considering “how” their decisions are going to be executed upon. It seems like 100% of decisions at Employ are cut spending or to price gouge customers without providing additional value. Just in the last 2 years Employ has seen: - Every member of the C-Suite turn over except for the CEO - 5 or 6 rounds of layoffs in a year due to missing every imaginable revenue target or restructuring a department - Laid off the head of diversity equity and inclusion - Engineering being outsourced to India - Announced company goals to raise prices for all customers without providing a better product or new features that are really that impactful. - Compensation for employees going from decent to below market value with very poor benefits and employer contributions. Employ has also further cut their contribution to benefits for 2024 resulting in some employees paying as much as 10x more out of pocket for the same or worse insurance selections as in 2023. - Little to no career advancement opportunities (yes this is being said by a manager who saw no future advancement opportunities for themselves or individual contributors on their team) - Issues paying employees on time. - A restructured bonus plan for non commissioned employees where depending on your level, you can earn up to 5% or 10% of your base salary in bonuses. To detail out the result of this change, if you have a base salary of $100,000/yr, the total you would have made from the restructured bonus before taxes in 2023 would have been $510.63 or $255.311. They restructured this plan again for 2024 and the teams would have made even less with the restructured plan. DON'T let the bonus mislead you. The core issue with Employ is that it is 3 totally different companies with 3 similar yet totally different products that the C-Suite wants to call “One Employ.” The core strategy of the company isn’t to have the best product on the market. It’s to churn customers to other Employ ATS solutions so they don’t lose revenue. This is not a bad strategy per say, but the strategy will never work because there is absolutely no investment in making the 3 products even remotely compatible with each other. The sales organization is taught to tell prospects that “it’s easy to migrate Employ brands,” but in reality it’s only easy to migrate your contract to another employ brand. The actual process of migrating to another Employ ATS systems is entirely manual, can take a very long time depending on which brand you migrate to, and has a totally different data schema so anything you report on will need to be recreated or possibly compromised on. As an Employ customer, there is just as much value (if not more value) in churning to a company like Greenhouse instead of another Employ brand as long as you aren’t worried about getting a new vendor approved.