Cars.com Reviews

Pros

Great people, great work life balance, fun work environment, and solid benifits.

The leadership is smart. They are heads and shoulders above the competition.

Cons

The company is 10 years behind the world in technology. Tough place to conqure if you did not grow up here. That is getting better, but created challanges for some. It definately helps to have a solid internal sponser.

Advice to Senior Management

Be careful to not believe your own hype. Your competition is not your competition. The game will change in the next 36 months. Other .com companies are assembling large national sales forces.You are far more vulnerable than you think you are.

Pros

casual work environment, tech team is a fun interactive experience

Cons

sem and business team is rigorous and demanding and leaves little room for error, training stops completely very quickly, handful employees will take credit for your ideas/work

Advice to Senior Management

don't play favorites

Pros

great company gatherings, great people lots of growth potential if you play the corporate game the right way

Cons

The work load was heavy and management did not seem to have an efficient way to delegate the work appropriately and training for new hires was very disorganized,but management definitely needs to become more aware of training, the workload as well as the employees effort on the team needs more acknowledgement, which includes positive and negative feedback

Advice to Senior Management

stop so much with the politics, the phoniness and acknowledge your workers hard work and effort that is put in, better training instead of dumping the hardest features/products in the beginning

Pros

Work/life balance.
The people in the trenches - top quality.
It is a great place to work for your first or second job out of college.
The company was able to stay profitable and growing even in the down economy.

Cons

The only way to get promoted is to get in with the right people at the right time. While Cars.com was not always so political - as it has grown it has become more so over the years. There are two forms of managers - those who are highly engaged - too much engaged and micromanaging - and those who are just taking up space. There seems to be little attention being paid by the Sr. Management to get rid of the space fillers.

It's like Cars has a tenure system - if you've been there a number of years - just get comfy because you're secure in having a job for the rest of your life - no matter how many high performers have left.

The high performers who are in the trenches get overlooked regularly in favor of those individuals interested in politics. Lots of turn over for the most talented people after they have a few years of experience on their resumes.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a look at your management - get rid of those who are not encouraging and growing their employees....even if they've been there 6 - 10 years.

Pros

Good Mentorship
Party Hard
New Technologies to learn

Cons

Not enough work
Knowledge enhancement not much

Advice to Senior Management

Try to load work on the employees rather than just discussing about it

Pros

Great money and fexible hours. Enjoy the type of work, love my teammates, questions get answered quickly. Love the company.

Cons

Promotions can be challenging for empoyees, has become pretty politica process where it hadn't been before. Would like to see more inside promotions.

Advice to Senior Management

Promote from within the company and listen to the employees more as they are the ones who intereact with the customers.

Pros

great culture and easy going atmosphere....work hard..play harder!

Cons

its growing and with any growing company, politics come into place.

Advice to Senior Management

don't lose the culture!

Pros

Great benefits
Good work/life balance
Fun people
Great location

Cons

No room for growth (especially from sales to another department)
Complacent middle management that relies on employees to do their work for them
Favoritism

Pros

Great work life balance, relaxed work environment, tons of incentives/promotions, company is very financially stable. Approachable management team who is always willing to listen. Sales heavy organization.

Cons

Communication about what needs to change is minimal, Performance scales are metric based and no much consideration is given to keep good talent within the company. Communication across different departments can sometimes be difficult.

Advice to Senior Management

They need to really take a look at their workforce and decided who is an asset to the company and who is not contributing to the company's growth. A lot of people don't preform as well as others in the same role but are never reprimanded or demoted.

Pros

Company culture and overall business model is fantastic.

Cons

Classified Ventures corporate overhead and parent company lack of support. CV corporate isn't aligned with the business, and provides a third nipple that is unecessary and redundant. Gannett is a micro management parent company, as other owners are only focused on local operation and little on true company position.

Advice to Senior Management

Break apart cars.com, and establish a board that is solely focused on growth of business. Move about 25-30 of the corporate layers and move them to sales, product, tech or marketing for the cars.com business. There is no synergy between apartments and homes. So why does cars.com get hinged to these two real estate businesses other than to justify a larger corporate shell.