Institute for Integrative Nutrition Employee Review

Former Employee – worked at Institute for Integrative Nutrition full-time for more than a year

Pros – It comes with a lot of the standard benefits--health, dental, vision and life insurance; PTO (though VERY little); they pay for your metrocard ($104 transit check); and food (although that too has definitely gone downhill). Summer Fridays are nice.

Cons – The place seems to be hemorrhaging a lot of very good people right now, and I can see why. The upper management says there's a lot of mobility, but really it's all office politics and whether or not the CEO likes you at that moment. Since I've been here there have been two major sets of layoffs.

Also the hiring process is maddening. As a manager, I would not get to even interview people--instead HR would send me someone they did a group interview with and make me do a full 4-hour trial day with them, even if I could tell by their resume that they were completely unqualified for the position. Then, if there was someone I really liked but wanted to negotiate pay, they wouldn't do it. They start everyone out at an extremely low pay rate, and the raises are always the same. They now are saying they only do raises in November of every year.

No one who has good ideas is allowed to voice them. The CEO makes pretty much all decisions. Unfortunately, they often times are pretty careless ones without much thought. Even if other people had been working on something for a long time, he might just decide one day to can the project. I understand sometimes that needs to be done, but usually this will happen without any sort of conversation.

There is no cohesion here. Communication between the different departments has no common way of trickling through the office. Instead usually you'll find something out at the very last moment, even if you needed to be consulted on it in the first place. And there is no transparency.

Firing happens the same way. I had someone on my team who was doing a great job but was out with pneumonia for awhile and a couple days after she got back, I was told that the CEO wanted to let her go, even though her performance was stellar and our team badly needed her. I was not consulted, I was just told this was going to happen.

I do think HR is trying, but there's still so much of the company that's run solely run by the CEO, even as it climbs to 200 employees. But again, it's so confusing when there is a CEO and the founder of the company both in power, and the founder is basically the acting CEO and tells employees not to listen to the actual CEO.

Again, they start people off here with very little pay, and I think under two weeks of paid vacation. And 3 sick days.

Advice to Senior Management – Be more transparent. And you have to get the people on top out from their positions. It's as simple as that. They're running the company into the ground. All the good people are leaving. The morale is low, and you don't actually communicate to one another.

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