APA Agency Reviews

-HR is extremely shady and two-faced; they'll prefer to call you rather than email because they are so afraid of having a paper trail of their questionable processes -There are a few aggressive and hateful talent agents. Many agents here are actually awful at their jobs, so chances are you won't even be learning from intelligent/experienced people. -Low pay and weak benefits; $15/hour is the salary for both mailroom AND assistants. APA is extremely fickle about overtime, so you will rarely be allowed to log this, even if you are working well beyond the 40 hours. -The offices are spread across 3 different buildings; this makes it extremely inefficient and difficult to get around, especially if you are working in the mailroom and need to deliver things and set up conference rooms. You will be forced to ruin all of your required nice shoes/clothes because umbrellas are hard to manage when you're pushing a heavy mail cart across the street in the rain. -Diversity and inclusion is non-existent. They'll speak out or do a few things completely for show, but the reality is that this company is full of very white men and women who would never leave their comfortable bubbles to actually educate themselves on the issues minority groups face. So. many. microaggressions. -Lack of a collaborative and friendly culture. It feels cold walking around the different departments. Most agents are not friendly/open and perpetually seem to be in bad moods. I doubt most of the employees enjoy working here.

- Ownership has spent the last 2-3 years looking for a buyer for the company and while doing so have completely closed their purse strings to any sort of innovation or expansion that could cost money in order to make the company seem more profitable. Even logical purchases like laptops for senior staff who are on the road ~50% of the time were not approved. An investment firm did come in and explore buying a 1/3 stake in APA about 2 years ago - after conducting a due diligence exercise, they declined. APA brought in a COO a couple of years ago who wanted to try and instill an actual corporate culture (something APA was and is greatly lacking). He resigned after one year because the CEO nixed all of his culture-based employee initiatives that cost any money. - CEO is a Trump supporter and a climate change denier. Multiple partners have also gone on record supporting Trump. - Multiple public sexual and emotional assault accusations against partners and CEO have been brought to light over the past couple of years and have been widely reported in industry trade publications such as Variety, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter. All of the accused have continued to work for the company with no repercussions except for one agent who was outed as a pedophile. - Diversity and inclusion are words that are thrown around at the agency but are only catchphrases. POC hold no positions of authority at APA. Various "diversity" committees have been set up in name only but have not actually initiated any change. - Many APA clients across all departments of the agency are past their prime, C and D-level artists or entertainers. APA cannot compete with the CAAs and WMEs of the world when it comes to signing marquee talent - this results in any clients who overperform expectations leaving the company for the greener pastures of larger agencies. APA reps no marketable movie "stars" at the moment, has no true "arena-size" music acts, and represents no big network TV stars. It can become a frustrating scenario for any agent who works to develop their clients only to see them leave when APA cannot provide the full spectrum of services that they'd like. - Due to the current pandemic, the company may not survive through the summer of 2020. Layoffs have already occurred, with more expected in June. The music department of APA is the agency's largest revenue generator and with live events likely not occurring until 2021, this may signal the death knell for the company.