When I joined, I really did believe in the mission, and in leadership, and what we were doing. But over time, it became clear that the vision was lost. Gaslight: 1. CEO has literally (not exaggerating here) said that the goals that are presented internally to employees and used as employee performance metrics are higher and less attainable than the goals presented to investors and the board. 2. Leadership has no clue what they're doing. They fight amongst themselves, have competing priorities, and sabotage employee efforts to get close to the unrealistic goals they set. 3. When projects are assigned by leadership, project owners get no resources or formal, organized help in implementing them. When those projects don't go as planned, employees get blamed for poor performance. 4. Goals are bible, yet their projections are solely based on numbers. People who will be executing on those goals have no participation in their creation and end up working towards unrealistic and unattainable numbers. 5. Employees at all levels (from junior level to C-suite) are fired or let go with zero notice or improvement plan — this has happened to multiple people over the course of just a couple of years. Gatekeep: 1. Pay is awful. Severely below competitive salaries in the industry. 2. Pay raises are not tied to title promotions, but rarely happen without one. 3. Promotions feel impossible to attain. Certain promotions require direct report experience to attain, but the company is unwilling to hire more people to manage. Other positions simply have nowhere to be promoted to, so the promotion and subsequent pay raise is impossible. Leadership has openly admitted to not promoting people because they don't want to give them the title. 4. Diversity continues to decrease, after multiple layoffs and firings. The company becomes whiter and male-r by the day. 5. "Perks" are limited. Company is fully remote but offers no help with the expenses of working from home, or any other type of living stipend. Offered a one-time $100 stipend for office supplies. Just instituted 401k "match", by which I mean a one-time $500 deposit ($1000 in years to come) into employee 401k accounts. Quietly eliminated Summer Fridays. When asked about decreasing perks, HR points to unlimited PTO policy. However, after continuing layoffs and RIFs, leadership has begun to explicitly ask employees to reduce the amount of PTO taken. 6. Shady, and I mean SHADY, layoff and personnel management. Pregnant women, women on maternity leave, women who just returned from maternity leave, people who leave New York City, people who ask for better working conditions, people who are trying to protect their direct reports, and everyone in between is unceremoniously fired or let go. People are fired or let go without their managers' awareness. People unknowingly engage in their own replacement searches under the guise of hiring people to build their team; people are secretly replaced and only notified after their replacement has been found. Girlboss! 1. Press and marketing budget spent on media to promote personal fame and celebrity of the CEO instead of spent toward company goals. 2. Instagram and social media is not based in the reality of life at Ellevest. No company is going to post about its bad culture, but when the whole brand is built on disrupting toxic finance companies, it hits a special nerve when the exact same behavior happens within company walls. 3. Callous and backstabbing culture at the top trickles down to lower level employees. Leadership openly discusses firing team members on large calls. Certain toxic behavior (calling people out, rudeness, delivering negative feedback in public spaces) is not addressed, especially if the acting party is a high earner for the company. 4. Employees are made to sign a sweepingly broad non-compete when they accept the job. 5. The culture does not encourage its employees to challenge leadership or question the decisions. The reviews on Glassdoor about people who question the nature of the work they're doing or why leadership seems to be inept and what happens to them as a consequence are true. 6. Transparency is at an all time low. Fear over the market downturn and lack of strategic vision and coherence is manifesting in a toxic, opaque sludge of a culture.
