All of these issues are not in any particular order. Some of them had bigger initial effects than others, but all ultimately meant my time at Student Beans was not one I'm particularly fond of.
Their recruitment process is heavily flawed. Whilst I worked with some talented and hard-working people, they employed many people where it became clear that they lacked significant experience in the role they were working and that thorough background checks of experience were severely lacking.
Being more skilled and knowledgeable than most of the management that I was working with, meant that top-down decisions didn't make sense. We weren't brought into conversations early enough but still expected to magically fix the problems from their terrible ideas, and to no surprise from any of us, they were never happy.
No budgets for anything. Constantly thrown into situations that did not fit my job title and weren't relevant to the role I was in.
Being told our jobs were at risk by management regularly if we didn't get performance up, constantly being told our ideas weren't good enough to the point that the majority of the team I was working with were thinking of leaving. (our best performance always came from the ground up) The ideas that were forced upon us, were not relevant to our target audience of students so never worked. Very much told that we need to constantly be selling to students, even during a cost of living crisis when the research that was being done showed students were wanting discounts for food rather than shopping brands.
Upper management was happy to work with brands that have terrible reputations despite warnings from staff, and only when we gave pushback was it given to other parts of the business. Ethical standards were not upheld at all.
The company presents itself as progressive but it really isn't. They do not care about students; their target audience, or staff's well-being, as many of the others have stated, it was a regular occurrence to find out someone had been made redundant through LinkedIn rather than through proper channels.
Projects were forced through in ridiculous time scales that aren't humanly possible, think Christmas campaigns being dealt with in a matter of weeks before. Most companies start working on these things MONTHS in advance, not weeks.
No diversity in upper management roles, very weak values that aren't upheld.
No training given to junior members of staff, so there were many situations where mid-weight or senior members of the team had to cover for them.
Senior management forgot my existence on several occasions and gave credit for my work to others.
I didn't realise quite how depressed I was until I left Pion - Formerly Student Beans. Working here has meant that I am now on a back foot with applying for jobs and I have received more interest in my CV since taking on freelance work than I ever did with just the Student Beans credentials alone. So take from that what you will.
I advise that you read some of the other reviews because they talk about some important issues.
