Hootsuite Employee Reviews about "people"

Cons

Work is often feels as more operational/reactive rather than strategic/organized, which makes it difficult to move forward with some goals, even if they are agreed as a priority.

Cons

Not suitable for those who can't cope with hypergrowth!

Cons

The HR team disclose confidential discussions on a frequent basis and can be very underhand and unprofessional with exiting people without sound cause. There is a huge turnaround in staff, including management and c-level employees Management and c-level often make very emotional decisions and are not supportive when it comes to professional growth. They claim to be focused on people culture but there is little work-life balance - you may be able to work from home, but you are expected to always be working. It's dressed up as something Ryan likes to call 'grit'. About 60% of the people I worked with when I joined last year have been exited or moved on. The management and c-level team are very arrogant.

Cons

Unfortunately there are a lot of problems in the organization. I get the sense that 4-5 years ago it was an awesome place to work and really grow your career, which is why I was so excited to work at Hootsuite. I wanted to learn and grow with the company. However, there are major issues: - Low Pay. Everyone says it, but these days for Vancouver, it's really, really low. This demonstrates a lack of recognition of what's happening in the market place. - Lack of career growth. There are many people that have grown up with the company and experienced great opportunities. If you came on board in the last couple of years, it's been non existent. There's no standardization or documentation for career goals, promotions, training, etc. You are left treading water, wondering how you are performing and what you can improve on. - Bro culture. If you had said to me that this was an issue at Hootsuite when I first got hired, I wouldn't have believed it. Until I saw it in action. Working there felt like a popularity contest. I was told by my manager that I needed to become friends with certain individuals if I had any hope of progressing - unfortunately the caliber of my work simply wasn't going to be enough. I have never experienced this attitude in the workplace before. - Volatile environment. Key people would just disappear. People would leave and would not be replaced. There was a common complaint from leadership about how difficult it was to find good talent in Vancouver, yet the company allows very talented people to walk out the door everyday. It's very expensive to keep recruiting and replacing employees.

Cons

Vancouver is really still the heart of the organization and it feels like good work in the Toronto office goes unnoticed. The product is severly lacking the features to be truly enterprise. A lot of the features that pushed Hootsuite to be #1 in the Forester wave were still in development, which caused us to loose a lot of big deals.

Cons

There are zero women in senior leadership positions under the head of sales. The recent May offsite to set the strategy for the remainder of the year and beyond attended by the head of sales and his 9 direct report leaders who are all male may as well have been hosted at a men's club. What century are we in?

Cons

Work-Life Balance: This can vary from person to person, but it was just awful for the most part. Most CSMs were managing books that were too large for one person to handle and as time went on, CSMs were being expected to deliver on additional strategic engagements on top of what we already had to do on a day to day basis. Leadership just kept heaping on project after project without regard for capacity. Salary/Compensation: When you start looking around outwards, you realize how poorly Hootsuite pays relative to the industry. At the time I was laid off, my total comp (base + variable) paled in comparison to the base comp even other Series A/B startups were offering (and Hootsuite's no startup). In addition to meeting group metrics, part of your variable comp would be tied to completing MBOs which were almost universally disliked by CSMs given the amount of work you need to put in only to receive a small sliver of your variable comp every quarter. Executive Leadership: Despite the veneer of transparency they like to show off, ELT was surprisingly opaque about their intentions (and probably lying through their teeth at every town hall too). The fact that the rebrand occurred anyway only for the company to lay people off less than a month later speaks to the surprising lack of awareness on how everything would be perceived. Surely they would've had to know how the optics of the situation would look like. Even as someone in the GSO/GCO, I don't think the gamble in Atlanta paid off at all. Not only was there insufficient time to actually see the strategy through, leadership was hedging all their bets on Atlanta without giving them the support to actually succeed, in addition to setting unreasonable targets. Outside of that however, it probably wasn't a good idea to start a completely new office in the middle of the pandemic anyway – Atlanta was the pet project of a few people on the ELT (and one person in particular who just ruined the GSO). By the time this person was removed, the damage had been done. It took Ryan Holmes and co. about a decade to get Hootsuite to a place where it was really starting to lose steam, but the current (mostly American) ELT less than 2 years to run it to the ground. No emphasis on customer retention: Because the product itself is lagging behind the competition, Hootsuite has always placed greater emphasis on the partnership approach with clients. But now that leadership gutted the entire CS org primarily responsible for managing those relationships in the first place, I'm not exactly sure how they're going to deliver on this. At a time when other companies are investing in their CS orgs, Hootsuite has gone and done the complete opposite. All they've done is overburden an already stressed out sales org and having a CAM complete the job of 3 people now (CSM/Sales/Business Value). Annual contracts are standard in the SaaS space, but the majority of disputes always came from people who want to leave and are locked into their contracts. It always felt so disingenuous that leadership banked on catching customers off guard and hope their agreements would auto-renew, vs. actually renewing in good faith. We may have them for that year, but they would almost always decide to cancel the following year anyway due to the poor renewal experience they had, so the tactic usually ended up backfiring. Lastly I've seen other CSMs and salesfolks leave HS for greener pastures which pay more AND had a more manageable book. It was a really a shame to see such good talent go. It was just a revolving door of people leaving and managers struggled to get people to stick around. As a result, many accounts went through multiple CSMs even in one year, which does nothing to help maintain that long term relationship. As much as customer churn was a problem, CSM churn ultimately led to its own set of problems as well which directly affected customer renewal. Lack of investment in Product: I'm a big believer in having a good product that can sell itself, but that was only partially the case at Hootsuite. As someone in a customer facing role, it was tiring having to defend a product that was invariably behind our competitors, and making up reasons why the product doesn't do something you would expect to be part of the bare minimum (you can only use API limitations as an excuse for so long). While there are mechanisms in place to cascade feedback to the product team, the lack of resources means critical updates needed to put the product in a place where it would be competitive were never completed and if they were, implemented too late to make an impact. It's frustrating as well because you can see how hard the Product team works, but even their own leadership seems keen to push out features that would be the most flashy (not necessarily the ones that will deliver the most value to customers). The layoffs: It should come as no surprise to any insider that the layoffs were poorly thought out, period. Never mind the fact that while they let go of most people that day in NA/LATAM, they continued to string others along and many didn't know of their fates until a week or two out. This created a LOT of unnecessary stress and anxiety for people who simply needed to know where they stood. It was honestly mind boggling to see the people who were in 'limbo' awaiting their fates as well. The whole situation was just plain cruel and it was disappointing to see the company toy with people's livelihoods (and lives) like that. For the people who did stay, very little was communicated in terms of how to keep the status quo going. Just a lot of confusion in the days immediately following the layoff (and even today). Clients received ZERO communication from anyone at Hootsuite until much much later, and by then many were already disgruntled (but apparently ELT had already accounted for a certain amount of churn). More importantly, many managers had very little to no visibility that multiple team members were getting let go. One minute you'd be chatting with someone over Slack and the next minute, their profile would be greyed out and their name disappearing from the sidebar. DEI: On the IC level, you can expect to work with people from all walks of life and things were very diverse in general. Within my immediate team, I felt like I had a very safe environment where could bring my whole self to work. This inevitably starts to thin out the further up you go however and at the ELT level, it's still predominantly white.

Cons

The product itself lacks polish and "common sense" engineering. Product teams work in silos which creates a user experience that is incohesive. Lots of instability within the management group which creates an unstable environment for the employees.

Cons

No leadership from the top down, no strategy (other than to hit sales targets, which we rarely do), no focus, and no accountability for poor decision-making. 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work; the rest are just great talkers and politicians.

Cons

Obviously everything has it's cons, but for me, the pros outweigh the cons by a landslide. The "open" space may not jive well for people who need privacy to focus. They definitely hire a certain type of personality: people who are driven, passionate, friendly and have an interest in a variety of areas. It definitely helps to be outgoing here. They have a strong collaboration and team-focus attitude so it's important that people be willing to step outside their comfort zones and work well with a variety of people and personalities. It's easy to get distracted here (but that's not really a con, more like something you'll need to get used to) because people are so friendly and there other things like a great kitchen, gym, nap rooms, ping pong, foosball and more. It's actually pretty tough for me to come up with a lot of cons. I mean, I can nit pick, but the role I'm in is perfect thus far and my team is incredible.