The worst place I have ever worked - Anonymous employee Conversion Employee Review

1.0
May 20, 2020
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The only pros were that you can buy extra holidays, and also a few nice people there.

Cons

There is no sufficient training and mentoring as managers never have time for it so you are left to learn on your own. HR is not really organised, mostly spends time gossiping, and also very biased towards management, the rest of the staff is just replaceable for them. There are a lot of little groups and if you don't fit or are not included much, you feel isolated. Again HR doesn't care to change that. The company doesn't seem to be very stable because the strategy keeps changing constantly - one day they are expanding the team, the next they make almost a dozen people redundant, and so on. The atmosphere is the worst one I have been in at a job so far, they make the culture seem rosy and you think that at first but then you realise they only care about the work and not much about the people. I would not recommend this place for work.

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Conversion Response
6y
Thank you for the blunt feedback. I’m sorry you had such a bad experience here. I would have loved to talk about your concerns while you were at Conversion, so I could try to help. But I totally understand that you may not have felt comfortable doing so. I’m keen to share my perspective on the points you raise. Obviously I don’t know who you are or when you worked here, and I appreciate we’ve gone through a lot of change over the last couple of years. But let me at least share my perspective on where we are today. Training and mentoring – You’re right that we want people to lead their own development. But I don’t agree that people are left on their own and there isn’t sufficient training. We have worked hard on our onboarding (and it’s regularly complimented by new starters). Beyond that, we want people to take ownership of their own development. That’s why we have dedicated training budgets for absolutely everyone, and HR goes blue in the face reminding people to use it. (And to my knowledge, we’ve never turned down a single training request.) We’re not going to lay everything out on a plate – we want to encourage people to direct their training and to take ownership of their work and their progression, and we don’t foster that culture by being prescriptive. HR – Your feedback feels unfair based on the feedback I get from literally everyone else I’ve spoken to in the company over the last year. But I don’t know what your personal experience was, so it’s hard for me to comment. This is why everyone has 360 feedback from people across the company at least once a year, and can share any concerns with me anytime. Strategy – I totally agree that our company strategy used to be pretty vague. (There's another review on Glassdoor with the same comment.) But I don’t think that’s the case today (or for the last year or so). Back in 2018 and early 2019 we hadn’t defined our strategy, and as a result we shifted priorities regularly. That changed in H2 2019 – we set an ambitious 6 mo target and as a result, we increased our win rate 55%, while also launching 30% more experiments with a 46% increase in velocity. We then built on this in Nov 2019 by laying out our three year strategy (across people/product/profit). That strategy remains the same today. Since then, we’ve been delivering against that, planning out our targets quarterly and reporting monthly on progress. In my own personal 360 feedback, one of the comments focused on the lack of strategy a year ago, and how today it couldn’t be clearer. I’m sorry that you didn’t get to see this yourself. Atmosphere – This comment hurts the most – saying that we only care about the work and not the people. We work hard to create an environment that’s inclusive, where we always try to do the right thing for our people. Some examples from the last month… - One person halved their hours to allow them to look after their child during COVID-19. We kept their pay the same. - Another person had another job offer and was working their notice period when the UK went into lockdown. The job offer from the other company was then rescinded, so we extended their notice period with us so they could benefit from the furlough scheme. - And we’re still paying our cleaner while the office has been closed. I’d love to share more if I can, or to get the opportunity to address your specific concerns, if you’d like. Either way, I hope you have a better experience in your next role.

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5.0
Mar 17, 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Incredibly smart but also humble, funny, engaging colleagues. Some of the best people I've worked with! Everyone had good intentions and worked really well together. A good amount of team bonding events. High calibre of talent.

Cons

Time tracking is annoying but pretty common in agency. Not a lot of career growth unless you're a consultant as experimentation requires a limited scope. Pay is also not great.

1.0
Mar 14, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Work from home benefits and equipment provided - Team days where you get to meet other consultants and join brainstorming sessions - some lovely people working for the company, unfortunately, the wider culture is not supportive or nurturing

Cons

The treatment I received from this company was nothing less than grossly unfair and highly distressing. I started with the impression that the culture was fantastic and any feedback given would be appreciated and taken on board. I was told that Conversion had a nurturing culture that valued inquisitiveness, growth and personal development as priorities. After just 7 weeks of working at Conversion, I was treated very unfairly by a fellow consultant and manager whose feedback system did not offer me an opportunity to give my point of view. I had given all of my efforts and as a new person made small mistakes but this was thrown back at me and I was threatened directly with drastic steps unless I changed. I was told that I had made mistakes on a task multiple times when I had never been shown how to do it in the first place. There were other incidences of miscommunication involved that were offered in a biased and subjective way. I fully accepted some feedback was valid and actionable. However, after 5 days I was asked to join a call where again my feedback and point of view were not even taken into consideration. I was told that I had not actioned feedback within 5 days but I had shown clear signs of taking the feedback onboard. I was not even given the opportunity for even one week to demonstrate my skills. This call ended very negatively, it was brought about suddenly, alarmingly and unfairly. The decision was seemingly made up before I had even completed 6 weeks at the company and if you judge someone on their first six weeks then there is something wrong with the leadership style and management, not the new employee. The culture at Conversion does not reflect how they portray themselves as a company and I sincerely hope that no one is treated like this going forwards. The policies within Conversion are not widely known and not provided at the start of employment.

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