Pros
- Very driven employees, to a fault.
Cons
Where do we start... - Mission Driven: This is a sticker they put above the door to put on the facade. - Forward hires mainly entry-level employees on to their recruiting team (i.e. college grads and 1-2 Years of experience individuals) because they pay at the lowest bracket of compensation. Combined with their outlandish hiring philosophy (you'll willfully and happily make less money for the good of the company's mission) and lack of transparency, Forward loses out on top talent consistently. This trickles down to all organizations in the company. - When asked to provide resourcing for teams to hire in a more efficient manner, you won't be given them because all the hiring leaders don't have prior experience in recruiting to fully understand how to build value propositions and follow through on them (i.e. clearly defined career goals and paths to success, access to information on total rewards/compensation increases) - Retention is low and burnout is high at Forward and when management is pushed to provide information on how the company is dealing with this, they happily disagree and utilize misinformation tactics to quell any concerns. - The CEO is egotistical and controlling/micro-managing to the nth degree. He manages with fear based tactics rather than with empathy. -Like many other former and current employees have stated, the CEO will make you feel small, insignificant, and demoralized. He lacks the ability to trust other executives and garner buy in, which trickles down to direct employees who don't feel supported and are burnt out because much of management is too tired to try and be an agent for positive change. - Lack of ANY female representation or BIPOC on the executive level with little to no effort to change this. - A lack of HR support creates toxic environments and a toxic culture to thrive. For example, they tout a pro-debate culture wherein any opinion/informed decision will be valuable and heard, but in all practicality, this is far from the truth. Also, managers are not well equipped to manage employees as they is a lack of training to enable them to be successful due to a lack of Learning & Development trainings spurred on by the aforementioned lack of HR within the company. - The culture of favoritism, toxic egos, and immunity from repercussions runs rampant. There is a severe lack of empathy for employees and any form of constructive reasonable feedback given, whether it be return to office plans (not listening to their employee base and mandating a full return to office when it was clearly not safe to do so), or utilizing data to inform feedback and a follow up by management to completely disregard this. - Work/Life balance is horrible, even for startup standards. - Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere.