Good Start, Bad Timing - Business Development Representative (BDR) CrowdRiff Employee Review

Genuinely solid, honest, kind people, including SLT Good work life balance Cool industry, customers are great to work with

Attention is scattered across too many ideas and projects Major headwinds to the business (competitors, tourism in US)

- They have always been great at sussing out hires who are pleasant to work with and very good at what they do. I really liked my team. Company events were great when we still had them because everyone was so nice. - Flexible work environment, understanding that some employees are more productive at home and others are not. They used to have a much larger office and chose to downsize instead of forcing RTO so that employees could keep having a choice instead of being expected to upend their lives. - Vacation and PTO benefits were great. 4 to 7 weeks of vacation, 6 sick days, 5 personal days, a weeklong winter holiday shutdown, and for a couple of years alternating Fridays in the summer were company holidays. Every year you got a generous travel stipend based on tenure. People who lasted five years got a one-time gift vacation. - For a while, there were actionable growth tracks and a solid investment in junior employees. - Management (HR included) was flexible and understanding about extenuating circumstances, illness, etc and at times went above and beyond to support you. - Layoffs were more ethical than you hear about these days. Impacted employees to the best of my knowledge were given good severance and opportunities to keep in touch with their colleagues. This is not somewhere where you will find out you've been let go by having your laptop password or office keycard suddenly stop working. - The products are best-of-class. Customers hated having to downgrade to cheaper competitors. It was easy to be proud of the quality of your work. - The market base is just the right size for you to really understand your impact. Feedback from customers makes its way back to everyone involved. - My work was interesting and there was always something new to learn.

- SaaS market is unstable, customers’ budgets year to year are unpredictable and non-negotiable. Competitors swoop in to siphon them away with lower quality alternatives. When I left this was not getting better. - For employees, unstable market conditions translated to reducing or rescinding some of the best job perks, stagnating wages, growth opportunities disappearing, and if you'd reached your max vacation entitlement you had reason to expect that your time there was going to end soon. I have questions about how and why some of these things were arrived at as a response to declining ARR. - There were corporate restructures where employees found out during a town hall that their role was changing into an area/domain that was not always a good fit. It comes off as making some roles redundant in preparation for an upcoming downsize. Transparency and discussion ahead of time would go a long way here. - Restructuring was usually part of a pivot. Pivots were so frequent that at times it felt like some teams had no direction anymore. - Low confidence for new and prospective hires. Some employees would be hired and then impacted by mass layoffs before finishing probation. This looks bad on a resume and will make their job hunt more difficult. I'm not a finance expert, but something seems off if there isn't enough foresight 8 weeks into the future to know which business areas need a hiring freeze and for this to happen in multiple rounds of layoffs. - PD approach is incoherent at times. Expectations set by upper and middle management for employees are not always in sync. This includes PIPs where for some employees it does what it’s supposed to do by addressing a gap but other employees seem like they were being set up to fail. - There used to be a commitment to salary band transparency but this fell to the wayside. - Flexibility around extenuating personal circumstances kind of disappeared over time, or could be inconsistent depending on who your manager was. - It was hard not to notice some favoritism in recent years and inconsistency around how different employees in similar roles were treated for the same actions.