HubShout Reviews

Honestly, this company is exploitative. They wring every ounce of creativity from the writing team, paying them an obscenely low hourly rate. Similar jobs will pay around $45k per year while hubshout barely pays half of that. If you want a raise you will need to throw away all of your already deteriorating social life and focus only on projects, 'innovation', and company values. The pay is ridiculously low, sure, but that's not what irked me so. It was the leveraging of 'values' in such violently dishonest ways. Upper management will lead you to believe that values are a truly integral aspect of their organization and decision-making process. This is so far from the truth that the entire idea is laughable. There are no ethics here, at least at the upper management level. I would accept this as a critical requirement of company loyalty and employee retention, but it hasn't worked. The turnover rate here is astronomical. I've worked minimum wage jobs where the average employee has been with the company longer than people stay with hubshout on average. There's got to be a reason for this, a reason that higher-ups at hubshout actively ignore. As for the products themselves, writers slave away for forty hours per week at a quota of 45 articles and 5 extra tasks. Let's look at the extra tasks real quick: they are advertised as time you can spend enriching your own knowledge of marketing, business, and professional skills. This is not how they really work. You will end up spending over 5 hours every week on essential job functions, then have no time to enrich yourself. Plus, the writers (paid the least out of everyone) are the only employees that are required to do this. Now, let's look at the compensation itself. $12.23 per hour (non-negotiable), 40 hours per week, 45 task quota. That means you are doing roughly 1.125 articles per hour. This doesn't even factor in your 5 extra tasks. Each task is a minimum of 370 words, but most stretch past 400. Still, at the bare minimum, you need to write 416 words per hour, accounting for the adjusted hourly article rate. This works out to be just under 3 cents per word. Make no mistake, hubshout is a content mill with an office and rates worse than many gigs on upwork. Plus, it is made very obvious from the beginning that all writers are replaceable. Why? The articles we write are generic, poorly optimized, and low quality. Anyone with half a keyboard can write them. I don't mean to rain on hubshout's parade, BUT they have a lot of issues that need some serious work. Not least of which is getting the manipulative leadership tactics out of the cesspool. I won't go into detail here, because the person who reads and responds to these 'anonymous' glassdoor reviews likely already knows who wrote this. So, hi! You are a brilliant person and quite a strong leader, but please stop trying to manipulate your employees with your carefully chosen words. It is much more transparent than you realize.

The high turnover rate for writers and how long it has gone unresolved is thoroughly unsettling. Management acknowledges that there must be some problem behind it, and continues to ask for suggestions about what it is and how to resolve it. However, everyone is well aware the root problem is the absurd workload, at least in the long term, and yet it remains to be swept under the table by higher-ups. Employees in other departments are understandably hesitant to get to know new writers within their first few months considering they’ve seen so many come and go after just those few months, and in many cases only weeks. In my first two months of employment, four people left, and five people were hired. This all from a team of 10 to 12 writers. To make matters worse, management decided to increase the workload even further. This in and of itself is one thing, but management purposely worded the announcement to manipulate us into thinking the work load had been decreased from 48 tasks per week, to 45. In reality, depending on the meetings you had scheduled for that week, the quota had been raised to 50 tasks per week. During the few months I was there after the change, not once did management even utter “50”, in an attempt to keep up the charade. To top it off, they also added wordpress posting duties, which were interesting and useful experience, but were taking up more time that we didn't have. When the writers banded together to push for changes that would make the position more realistic, every easily solvable point was addressed, such as more workspace and free coffee. But these were only smoke-screens, seeing that no attempt was made by management to address the new quota: The biggest issue we put forward. Other important points, including the enormous stress from the workload and the health concerns it generated, were immediately brushed off with a simple,"well then you probably shouldn't work here." In individual cases, that may very well be the case. However, with multiple similar complaints, it should be obvious there is a major issue. If you are having trouble keeping up with the workload, their method of helping you get back on track is to essentially to toss you in a ditch and see if you can drag your way out, all while looming under the threat of immediate termination. If for some crazy reason that first stint doesn’t motivate you in the long term, they simply continue to dig the ditch deeper until success is practically unfeasible so they can push you out. If you are willing to put your integrity aside, you can definitely brown nose your way to the top and do very well at this company. No one could blame you considering the current scarcity of jobs, so more power to you. However, if sucking up isn’t your thing, you could also write complete dribble as long as you write a ton of it, and do just as well. On the other end of the spectrum, going out of the way to increase brand awareness and other higher-quality content creation strategies, which have been proven to be more effective than the shear quantity of keywords, will be seen as insubordination and laziness if the full quota is not always met. They say that quality is the staple of their business, but in the end, every employee is quantified only by a number on a spreadsheet. This all is able to happen thanks to the “inspirational,” but hollow words spewed by management. Many seem directly ripped from a TED talk which can be good, but only if you follow up and understand the true motivation behind the advice, rather than using it as a tool to make yourself look progressive. Upper management is open to listening to new ideas, feedback, and complaints, but that doesn’t always mean the issues will be addressed. Higher-ups even attempt to reassure you are being heard by documenting what you say word-for-word during meetings. However, I came to realize that your words were often later used against you as well. Some of management is well educated in business psychology, which is obvious from the cheap business tactics used to manipulate employees they want to get rid of into believing they had, “had no choice but to punish/fire you.” This is so common, that they are able to boast a very low rate of actual termination. However, this is only because they make the work so difficult for those that are struggling, that naturally they will quit before they can be fired. I don't necessarily want to blame all of management for this, because it's obvious their hands are tied in some of these situations. No one can really afford to lose their job nowadays. The bottom line is that high writer turnover is essentially ingrained in their business strategy at this point. They have a constant line of potential hires ready to fill any vacancy that may occur. Because finding a writing position or entry-level job in general is so difficult, they know they can continue to do this for the foreseeable future. Although, if you feel you can write mindlessly all-day everyday, then go for it. This is probably a good job for you. As you may have noticed, there is a surprising disparity in reviews for the writing positions, always being rated at either a one-two star, or a five star. Considering this is a content generating company, it’s pretty safe to say the majority of positive reviews are either fake or an attempt by former employees at getting a better reference in the future. Just more shady business tactics. The owners come from a long history of working with big businesses, and are using the same strategies at a small startup. If they remain on this trend, they may very well be headed for disaster. It would already seem they have backed themselves into a corner where they can’t afford to lower the quota anymore. Apparently constantly losing and training new employees makes up for it? The writers, the ones making the actual product, are seriously undervalued, as well as exploited. There’s no room for empathy in big business. Even with just 50 employees, you won’t receive much at HubShout either.