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Forge and Smith

Is this your company?

Very high turnover, questionable HR practices - Anonymous employee Forge and Smith Employee Review

1.0
12 Oct 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The office is clean and the workstations are nice enough (new or new-ish iMacs, quiet office, enough personal space). Sometimes the owner or a staff member will bring their dog in for the day. Standard snack cupboard (though it is not always stocked), nice coffee, free lunch every second Friday from a local BBQ restaurant (or elsewhere if you have dietary restrictions).

Cons

One thing is very clear from my experience working at this agency: while the owner goes to great lengths to make his employees believe that they are valued, they are in reality disposable and will be fired / laid off / etc. at the drop of the hat if the bottom line says so. There is an *extremely* high turnover rate at this business. Other notes: Hiring trends - The owner will often hire bootcamp grads, career switchers, or generally inexperienced workers, not give them any support or mentorship, overload them with projects and then fire them if they don't improve under these circumstances. Rather than hiring this type of employee with the long-term goal of developing their skills, he pushes them to their limit and if they can't handle it then he lets them go. Remember: the only thing that matters is the bottom line. Turnover - It is extremely high. The owner hires and fires in wild swings in order to capitalize on market trends, but without making it clear to the new employees that that is their role. The work force turns over annually, with only a small handful of employees staying long-term. Management - The owner also goes to great lengths to make sure that the office is politically correct (this is good), but then ignores his own rules by making inappropriate comments. Example: while playing a board game at lunch an employee was dealt a card called the Queen several times in a row. In response, the owner put on an offensively stereotypical voice and said something along the lines of "oh, you're such a queen". Office culture - If you enjoy socializing at all at work (aside from over lunch hour), this is not the place for you. People show up 5 minutes before the day starts, work straight through until lunch, sometimes play board games over the lunch hour, then head back to their desk for the rest of the day. Employees are often behind on deadlines and scared to death to take a break / chat for a few minutes. Location - It's in New Westminster. Deceit - the owner will often dangle carrots in front of employees then take them away. Raises will be verbally promised, but when the time comes they turn out to have been a "misunderstanding". The job posting will list one wage, but when the position is offered that initial wage will turn out to "have been posted in error". Quality of work - This is not unique to this agency, but while the business claims to produce high-quality, highly customized websites, they border very closely on a template, and if you look through the agency's portfolio you will see many similarities across projects. This is not the fault of the designers or UX team, but the "quantity over quality" approach to the business that leads to this being the case. The owner is also obsessed with time tracking, so employees rush to cut corners and finish sooner rather than spend the extra time to do it right. Once again, this is not unique to this agency, but something to keep in mind.

Forge and Smith Response
8y
I want to start by thanking you for your feedback. While painful and difficult to hear, we will take this as a very serious opportunity to improve and double down on our efforts to create the very best working environment for our team. We are committed to creating a comfortable, transparent and collaborative environment so I am deeply disappointed to hear about your experience and perspective. As Forge and Smith continues to mature, we continuously look for ways to improve our process and quality of work for our clients, and the ease of the process they are helped through. The same must be true of our team members without question or exception Effective immediately, we are implementing improved HR services including a slower and more detailed hiring process, the utilization of external resources to offset short term work load needs, and additional in-house project management support. I wanted to thank you for you feedback and wish you the best of luck in future endeavours.

Explore other reviews about Forge and Smith

5.0
7 May 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people are very friendly and easy to work with, culture, 100% remote work, 4 days work week, flexibility, profit sharing 2x a year, great extended heath insurance, $250 wellness amount a year to be spent on a lot of options, great leadership team, a lot of transparency including in the pay scale structure. Very friendly towards junior, a lot of room to develop skills. Definitely a hard combo to come by, I genuinely had an amazing experience at Forge.

Cons

Since the company is not very big, perhaps room for growth could potentially be an issue if you intend to be in a leadership role eventually. Mainly WordPress work if you're in development.

5.0
31 Mar 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Cool and professional people to work with. -Have all the resources given out to you so you can perform well on tasks and deliverables. -Transparent and Approachable CEO -Helpful Managers that cares a lot in your growth in the company

Cons

-Nothing that I can think of so far

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