Family Company, Led By Boys Club of Senior Leadership, Failing to Keep it's Best Talent - Anonymous employee Edmunds.com Employee Review

The infamous Edmunds layoffs of October 2017 were a true turning point for the company’s trajectory. In the first half of the year, with the release of the new 2017 website, the company suffered some heavy hits across the entire traffic front. There was an aura of illusion for the first half of that year, because us employees would keep hearing that the business was slowly failing (traffic declining, dealership issues, etc.), but there was seemingly no consequence and the business still seemed healthy. A lot of people at the company, including myself, were confused as they continued to add cool benefits (daily salads and free snacks, new health initiatives), when it seemed like many parts of the company were failing. Then in late October, without notice, almost 60 people were laid off. We were told that the executive team became acutely aware 'too late' that these issues were plaguing the company and that they would have to take cost out of their infrastructure moving into 2018. There are only two possible explanations for this. 1 - The executive team genuinely had no idea this had to happen until a few weeks before the layoffs, in which case I am genuinely amazed by their blind stupidity; 2 - Which is my guess - They had known since January 2017 that we were losing in the competition in the industry but were standing with closed eyes, blindly hoping that they would wake up one morning with all of our problems fixed. Ostensibly, this was never going to happen. When they could no longer turn away from the issues the company was having, and they saw the damage was irreparable, they haphazardly went through and found 60 people to cut to save their own skin. NONE of the executive leadership was let go. Only people in the middle to lower levels that helped answer the same questions that the executives would freak out about time and time again. This is what made me seriously lose faith in this company. Although I was not laid off as part of this cohort, the sentiment after the layoffs has been largely the same. There is still a culture of fear of the executive team, where in one ear we hear soundbites of hopefulness from our Executives, and in the other ear the VP’s and the Exec. Directors are badgering at us the same demands that we heard in 2016, because they know the C-Levels actually do have the same requests. There is truly no unified vision for the company - every week is some new initiative that they have put together at the last minute. As long as the same executive team is in place, I have no hope for the future of this company.