Cvent Reviews

Pros

Awesome, getting to work in clients

Cons

More open with their employees

Advice to Senior Management

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Pros

1. Great place to work.
2. Surrounded by young and smart people.
3. Don't know about other departments but everyone in technology gets along very well. There is a fat exception though.
4. Senior management is supportive and transparent.
5. Company culture is awesome.

Cons

1. Say good bye to work life balance. They expect you to work 9 hours a day at least and possibly more. On an average most people in technology works 50 hours/week. If you are not used to working long hours with no paid over time then you are in for a treat. Sucks even more if you have family as you can't give them time. By the time you get home you are like a dead fish.
2. Commute suck. Period. Expect to be stuck in traffic for hours.

Advice to Senior Management

Management is good and they make you feel like you are working for google or facebook.

Pros

Mostly filled with fresher graduates, so the atmosphere is overall pretty lively.

Made quite a few friends.

Good IT infrastructure

Supportive HR department

Cons

Senior Management just loves to turn a blind eye to anything that's happening to junior level employees.

A bad middle level management filled with incompetent managers and senior managers who think they can boss around whenever they can making their subordinates look like slaves.

Politics and gossiping are both at extremes. There's practically no rest even for the ones who prefer to stay out of it.

A 9 hour daily work was what they demanded from each employee. Even if you work for a whole 16 hours, the level of importance would still stay the same. People are made to work like robots. A check is kept on how many times an employee punches his keycard to find out the number of hours spent inside which would directly correlate to the number of productive hours irrespective of whether you spend the time at your workdesk or the washroom.

Keeping a good rapport with the seniors is a good way to stay in the good books of both the middle and senior level management. Thats what the situation over here demands.

Getting a PTO, an acronym for paid time off is like completing a 100 meters sprint in 9 seconds or less. You have to earn it if your interaction with some of the so called senior associates is minimal else, its just a walk in the park.

You may work like a mule the entire year and keep the senior level associates happy, but one little stretch of non performance and you're as good as doomed even if you got valid reasons for the downward spiral.

As much as Cvent still continues to deny this by calling themselves a KPO, the fact still remains that the company still follows a thorough BPO culture.

Advice to Senior Management

Try and understand whats happening at the India office. I had a good 1.5 years from my time of joining, but after that it was like a roller coaster ride through the shores of hell.

The marketing team needs a complete revamping. The manager and his immediate juniors need to be thrown out. This way I'm sure, nearly 80 percent of the team would be happy. Also try and identify potential conventionally rather than only giving weightage to those who are friendly with you.

Try and gauge the performance of the employees based on what efforts they have put rather than what they haven't done.

Turn a deaf year to opinions of certain employees that sound fabricated in order to get a substantial growth within the company.

Pros

Cvent is a high growth and energetic company that rewards you for working hard. They have great training when you first start (if you start during the summer time where they train about 60 people for 6 weeks). The people are great and i respect the management team. I am not sure i want a career in software, but if you do you will learn alot here. They hire almost all high achievers and if you thrive in that environment then you will like it here. The two things i like the most here are that you can take on a ton of responsibility within a few years (i talk to my friends who work at other companies and they barely have real contact with clients) and you have the opportunity to go to our india office after being with the company for a few years. I have and will continue to recommend Cvent to my friends.

Cons

The job can get slightly boring sometimes (i have worked at other places so i know this happens everywhere). The company measures your performance alot and hitting your metrics every month is stressed quite a bit, but they are pretty laid back about letting people work the hours they want and even going to the gym at lunch time. The last thing i would say is we need to better understand our career path at the company if we stay long term. You will have to commit to a 2 year training agreement - the company is up front about it and i understand it, but make sure you want to join the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate more what is going on with the company. The company has grown so big i have little idea of what is going on around the company. Spend some more time with the little guys.. we joined because i was really inspired by the CEO and it would be great to have more interaction with him and the other senior management. Keep us growing fast so i can move up into a manager position....

Pros

They hire a lot of young people, around my age, and I made tons of new friends.

Cons

The hours: "Normal" hours are considered 9-6:30. I worked 8-5:30 and when I would leave at 5:30 I was made to feel guilty for leaving "early". I very rarely took a lunch break because I had too much to do.
Understaffed: For some reason they refused to hire additional team members to help my team with our workload. We were all always swamped and that made us hate our jobs.
Management: They don't listen to their employees, pile on the work, and make the employees feel guilty for taking time off/leaving "early" (which is really on time!)

Advice to Senior Management

Sponsoring a happy hour every once in awhile is nice, but to boost morale, a schedule with NORMAL work hours should be set, and all managers should be sent to a leadership class. Although many of the managers are young, they shouldn't be best buds with their subordinates. Nor should they be knowingly gossiping about co-workers with their subordinates. Management needs to fix things ASAP or they will have a mass exodus of people leaving!

Pros

strong management team, growing company

Cons

limited pay in terms of commission

Advice to Senior Management

reevaluate compensation plan

Pros

The place is filled with young people right out of college - many of them smart, almost all of them great people to work with. Really, the people are great.

Free health care.

The chance to go to the India office for a couple weeks.

The company is profitable and growing very fast.

Cons

The number one slimiest, least ethical, and worse thing about Cvent? You will be required to sign a 2 year "bond" (their words). It is basically a two year contract with a "training loan" included. The contract will stipulate repayment of the loan if you quit before two years. This will not be an insignificant amount of money. The training you go through will be almost entirely applicable only to Cvent. The exit process is notoriously rough in part because of the bond and how Senior Management handles it - and yes, Senior Management (the CEO, really) will be involved with your exit process and will fight tooth and nail to extract the money from the quitting employee.

Keep in mind that the quitting employee is likely a year out of college quitting an entry-level telesales or customer support position. Do you know any CEOs who seem to really enjoy fighting 24 years olds over a couple thousand dollars?

They know they have retention issues, but rather than attempt to solve those they try and force employees to stay.

Other than that? The pay is decent, never anything outstanding. The work is very unlikely to be interesting. If you stay you will certainly advance, but that may or may not bring the sense of fulfillment you're looking for. They are growing very quickly and are quite profitable - but they have no match on the 401k.

You will get 3 weeks PTO, which is pretty run of the mill. Not bad or out of the ordinary, but it still sucks to have to take vacation time when you're sick.

You will work long hours. They will micro-manage your hours and your other metrics.

Finally, the company is profitable and growing very fast... which I listed as a pro, but it also a con - Cvent is and will continue to have some growing pains. I'm sure Senior Management will navigate through them eventually, but the ride may well get rougher for the average employee. Of particular interest will be what happens when the first big class of hires hits the 2 year mark and can all suddenly quit without penalty... will there be a mass exodus?

Advice to Senior Management

Pay more attention to why your employees are unhappy and lose the "training bond" - you gain absolutely nothing by strong-arming people into staying for 2 years when they are not a good fit for the position.

Pros

Opportunity to go abroad in India

Cons

some senior management is uninvolved

Advice to Senior Management

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Pros

I decided to give some thoughts on Cvent because one of my friends who i encouraged to apply for a job at Cvent told me about this site and i do not think it fairly represented what the vast majority of the employees feel about the company. To give you a sense of how the company is doing, in June 2009, the Washington Business Journal award Cvent as "one of the best places to work in DC" after doing a confidential survey of all the Cvent employees. In addition, our CEO was just named the 2009 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Greater Washington area - we were all pretty excited about these two awards.

 Cvent is an extremely fast growing and successful company. The best thing about the company is it puts you through a 8 week training course and really gives you the freedom to grow quickly within the company. The management team is great and they have all been at the company since it started so you know they are really passioniate about the company. Most of my colleagues are prettyhappy at the company. I know that people that leave the company almost always end up going to get their MBA or Law degree. The environment is very young and web 2.0ish (if that is a word). I would say all the young people hang out on weekends with other Cvent people because we have some really cool people that work here. Probably the best thing about the company besides the ability to grow quickly is that everyone here is very smart and they like to work hard - but party hard. Great culture, great opportunities and they really invest in their young employees and help them mature into leaders.

Cons

I think management sometimes is so focused on growth and getting into new product lines that they do not communicate everything that is going on in the company. We have 2 or 3 company wide meetings a year where are CEO goes through all of our financials and strategy (i am pretty surprised with how transparent the company is with all this information) but i think we need to get into smaller groups to discuss how we can get more involved. You really have to believe in the motto "work hard and play hard".

Advice to Senior Management

I really like and trust our senior management. They are all very bright and i think they really care about the employees. One piece of advice would be to slow down and catch everyone up on all the initiatives going on in the company... that would help make all of us more effective. The other piece of advice would be to keep up the good work...you guys have really made a positive impact on my professional career.

Pros

Great people. I will say it again, Great People! It is all about the environment and culture. Cvent is a great place to work. Young and Vibrant!

Cons

No cons really. You have to be prepared to work hard if you want to succeed and make a name for yourself here.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep it going strong. Senior management should be in touch a little more with the employees in order to keep the culture going.