Zopa Reviews

Pros

Social, disruptive, great employees, great management

Advice to Management

Value your employees with monetary incentives

Pros

+Been here for around a year and a half now and seen the company grow lots!
+We make sure we hire the right people that follow our values and who are truly interested in our product. It makes all the difference.
+I have all the tools needed to do my job.
+Flexible working (working from home days and relaxed hours)
+Senior management are all approachable, friendly and help get things over the line when needed.
+Nice perks - breakfast, Friday company drinks, zocials.
+Amazing offices on the Thames, with an awesome view of the city.
+A really friendly place with a good positive vibe around the office.
+Clear mission statement.

Advice to Management

You've created an awesome place to work and it will only keep improving. The people here are the best thing about it. Let's do our best to keep everyone we can and recruit the best talent. moving forward.

Pros

- Awesome people: smart, ambitious but also really nice
- Great managers to learn from, passionate and always willing to help/mentor
- In between a start-up and a company, so you get to try out a lot of things yourself and be very hands-on without the bureaucracy of a big company, and without feel as stressed as you would in a start-up
- The company is genuinely trying to build great products for customers, great mission
- Tribe set-up: all projects involve designers, developers, analysts, data scientists working altogether
- If you know what you want out of your career, you have room to make it happen
- Friday drinks :)

Advice to Management

- Continue to focus on building great products and protecting vulnerable customers
- Invest more money into people, talent is gold
- Keep the great culture alive
- Be more aggressive in entering new markets

Pros

-great management who care about their people
-good attitude towards making improvements based on feedback
-high performing but laid back culture
-great location

Advice to Management

-better articulation of organisational design and recruiting priorities
-maintain the openness with staff as we continue to grow

Pros

Quick interview process - all done in a day
No catch-you questions, but genuine getting to know you and see whether we can work together
Stimulating job with varied tasks every day
See things end-to end from idea to technical solution and call centre agent training
Plenty of growth opportunities, both personally and professionally, when you ace one thing you are given two bigger things to work on concurrently
Start-up feel

Advice to Management

Get better at making the progression for analysts better defined

Pros

- Smart, good people to work with.
- Diverse, ambitious teams
- Location
- Great CEO - he really cares
- Flexible star/end hours
- Working from home negotiable
- Friday afternoon drinks

Advice to Management

I gave ZOPA a 3 because it felt like a 5/5 during my first months there, and a 1/5 when I finally did leave !

ZOPA was at its peak when at that special place, growing from an ambitious startup to a proper business.

Unfortunately the transition brought a lot of bad corporate elements with it. Teams lost their autonomy, the HR department sort of became an enforcer rather than a supporter to the employees.
Developers lost their voice when it came to following tech stacks, tools, or practices and a lot of decisions were made behind closed doors only to be announced to the teams afterwards. In sum, ZOPA went from : Do as I do, to do as I say.
Still, I feel the situation can be fixed if management realises that they had the right recipe to begin with:

a) Hire good people
b) Put the right people in the right job
c) Give developers an agreed set of tools and practices (.NET, Java, Ruby, etc)
d) Allow the teams involved in the actual work to decide which of the pre approved tools to use
e) Reward effort, and encourage good practices between the developers
f) Reward people who try the hardest - and I am not referring to myself. I've first hand witnessed give it their all and be treated poorly... As a fellow reviewer stated, success is almost never appreciated; something I tried to encourage and change but did not get very far with.

You got talented people everywhere. Just go back to one of your manifesto's points: Strive to do things right :)

Pros

- There are some truly smart and inspiring individuals here
- Eggs for breakfast
- Good office location

Advice to Management

1. Value your talent with salary increases and adequate bonuses (instead of wasting it on eggs and cereal: they don't necessarily fit into everyone's diet)
2. Purge all mediocre PMs
3. Offer clearly defined career paths

Pros

- Location is good
- Some very helpful people
- There is a salary
- The founder is very approachable and friendly

Advice to Management

- current status quo needs a serious shake up

Pros

- Some good, smart and passionate people.
- Nice office.
- Friendly and social.

Advice to Management

Listen to employees, especially those that have been there the longest.

Our team structure was modified often on the recommendation of new hires/uninformed consultants that didn't know the pain points.

Any success within the team was credited to the new changes, whilst any failure was thought to be issues with the last person in charge of the problematic issue. Nobody spoke to the people actually doing the work, only ever the person with new brightest idea on how to rearrange a team.

Pros

Great people to work with, good work/life balance.

Advice to Management

Invest more in training your managers so they can help the teams. Many people lack motivation as they feel undervalued and moral can be low.