Zello Reviews

Company champions a “hire and fire” policy, and given the strong cultural issues and lack of desire to change it I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Most employees leave within a year. - The company glorifies extremely long hours, you will end up working late nights and weekends. Taking PTO for more than a week will raise red flags across the org with managers subtly hinting at avoiding folks to do so. - Roles are advertised as a “hybrid” but in reality you’d be expected to be in to the office from 9 to 9 on 4/5 days. - Much of the leadership and middle management has low EQ, and no desire to change even with retention issues. Management views employees as objects not people. No company is perfect here, but most experiences with the team here have been exceptionally bad. Glassdoor reviews are true and confirm this. - Extremely dubious “tech company”, where almost every tech aspect of the business is outsourced offshore. It operates a consulting business - No autonomy granted in roles. Decision making is extremely opaque and top down with priorities changing week over week. Middle management is encouraged to micromanage. This is evidenced by strong attrition and extremely short tenures of folks (even at exec levels) at the company. - No desire to invest in technology tools to help simplify work processes - resulting in extremely mind numbing and unchallenging work.

Most people here are in a bubble. They've been at Zello for so long and don't fully understand the greater industry around them which causes them to fall behind or just plain not have the knowledge to make the calculated business decisions in order to be a major player for what we do. A lot of the individuals in leadership positions seem to be playing "house" with a company, and do things they think are important, but those things are often just busy work with no actual impact. Not many people here are modern business professionals with the ability to help propel the organization to the next level and hardly any of them are actually present in the startup community or even local community for that matter. The internal tools, processes, and knowledge sharing are an absolute mess, and the only people that actually know how things work are those with deep levels of institutional knowledge. We even have a few members at the executive level that flat out don't know how the product works, how some processes work, and the history behind some of the features and roadmap items. A lot of the processes are so junk (and everyone knows they are) but if you want to change anything you're tasked with creating a massive project report with data, and form an insane committee to even get permission to test your ideas. You can't have this and expect to be a fast paced software organization. It takes way too long to do anything and there's so much red tape. They would rather leave a broken or difficult process in place than actually put in the work to fix it. The CEO recently took over the oversight of revenue; which is absolutely wild considering that he has a strict technical background and flat out doesn't see value in having a marketing team. He also relies heavily on converting a massive amount of free trials into paying customers, yet still wants the company to somehow achieve being an enterprise level tool. The CEO is a brilliant technical mind, no question about that; but it reflects poorly on his leadership ability that he doesn't give other people in his organization the tools to succeed, then when they don't, then he pushes them aside and tries to run their function himself. It seems like anyone that challenges the status quo or tries to implement a new idea gets shut down. The CEO also gave a really threatening speech over the summer last year about the company falling behind on revenue goals (which I know, shocker without any marketing), and reaffirmed the organization that layoffs weren't being considered. Over the course of the next few months there were tons of random exits that weren't really well addressed and we were all told were that those people were leaving at will or it was performance related and that just simply wasn't true. They had even dismissed our previous technical recruiter during the hiring freeze only to reopen a technical recruiter role a few months later hahaha it's like they just don't really think too far ahead. I'm sure some of the people that left were performance reasons, but there were multiple people in mid or senior leadership that jumped ship as well and that's just not a good sign.. And now even into 2025, we actually did have formal layoffs. So I wouldn't recommend anyone work here unless they want to look over their shoulder in fear every week...