Gannett Employee Review

Former Employee – worked at Gannett full-time for less than a year

Pros – Not a lot to say here... There are many good people within the company but a few spoil it for everyone.

Cons – Unfortunately my experiences were pretty negative. I was guaranteed in contract and writing three months commissions, I only received one after two months of work before being terminated. The services on the products Republic Media/The Arizona Repblic/Gannett/Gannett Local sells are an absolute mess.

The levels of in-depth support on said services leaves very little to be desired. Advertisers should expect better quality and ROI for their money, honestly. There's very little to no standards in Ad Quality, Digital Campaign Standards and the company as a whole is severely lacking in experience.

Account managers are over-worked and under paid. They also handle the brunt of some client relations and workload that should belong to Sales Executives gets dumped on their laps.

In respect to sales management, there's very little adherence to KPI such as talk time, sales appointments run, conversion rates, proposals made and the modern practices of using Salesforce.com (for effective pipeline and lead management). All standard practices are virtually non-existent. the offices in Mesa, AZ sound like a Library, there's virtually little to no sales activity happening here... There's two or three people that carry that entire office, God bless them for it...

Employees are very cliquish and stand-offish. Regardless of your personal or professional experience they tend to disregard everything you say; then they take credit for your suggestions or work. The company is terrible at recognizing any individuals contributions.

Some of their employees tend to be super exclusive and hold the failures of previous employees or other working groups against you. They are quick to make personal judgments about you, one employee keyed my car. I had managers laughing about having to let me go because I couldn't "meld with their team" and basically told it was "too bad if I had to put in 10 hour days" that that's what's "expected of an employee in their first 90 days".

In summary, high promises with unobtainable goals, terrible management, even worse at internal communication, bad product/service pricing, terrible to non-existent customer service, terribly unrealistic expectations from management. Top that all off with a negative culture and a lot of complaints around the office. The Mesa office has some great staffers who have been there a long time. They are what keep this office rolling and deserve raises across the board.

Unfortunately filled with seriously unprofessional behavior that no self respecting person could tolerate it for very long unless you're desperate for a salary and a good beating every single day.

I've never experienced anything quite like I did at this company, in my entire life.

Advice to Senior Management – Get your sales staff to adhere to KPI, don't take everything that your sales team tells you at face value. Don't allow your staff to alienate new members of your team and work harder at making newly hired employees feel more welcome rather than dragging them through the mud and loading a ton of extra work on them. Develop a training and/or onboarding process for newly hired employees that actually makes sense. Seriously unprofessional to laugh in a "private"/"closed doors" meeting about terminating an employee.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company