-The overarching issue at GKR is with upper management, in particular around the CIO and the technology. They advertise themselves as a technology-forward company, but their CRM/ATS is slow, lacking basic features of its competitors, and extremely bug-ridden. The IT developers are not incentivized to create a better product, and after years of development, you will realize your workflow reduce to a snails pace. This is a problem for top billers.
-Resistant to new ideas and new technology tools that may compete or threaten their in-house built ATS on the salesforce platform. If there's a cheap technology (or doesn't require any budget-spend at all) available that can generate revenue, it's nearly impossible to get upper leadership on-board - they maintain (and likely coming from the CIO) a tight control on the technology tools available, regardless of the actual security concerns of using third-party applications.
-Hostile and out-of-touch upper management approach to technology, where it's seen as a non-issue for basic tasks that used to take a few seconds now taking minutes. This adds up - i lost many hours of productivity every week trying to comply with this bulky system. Explained more in the next bullet point
-There is a ton of unnecessary manual data entry - it's a time-consuming process to even code candidates and sales contacts (all profiles enter the system as "lead", and need to be manually moved to candidate or contact, which is time-consuming and unnecessary), there's no bulk upload functionality, and their email-based resume-parser doesn't autofill details correctly, requiring the recruiter to manually edit multiple libraries for each candidate, and fact-check and often re-enter details about each candidate -including their entire work history, where they live, their title, the company they work for, etc. Everything that a real competitive ATS does for you automatically.
-ATS lacks functionality in many areas, including: no pipelines for candidates to be associated with job orders - candidates are just floating in the database or assigned to your user profile, and it lacks search functionality like zip code proximity, so you can't even effectively utilize the database of local candidates in the NYC market; their mass-emailer is junk, it's buggy, has low deliverability, and lacks basic functionality of an emailer like multi-touch campaigns or replying to a previous email; no effective way to import candidates from LinkedIn (again this becomes manual); the ATS itself is very slow, taking 5-8 seconds to load each page
-Micro-management without focus - they advertise as a place with very little management, and this is true from a training perspective and a low volume of meetings, but they're tracking every click - just be honest about this.
-Outlook and Salesforce ATS doesn't sync (because quote "it would require too many resources to enable), so you have to manually record each email you send. If you don't then your managers will questions if you're really working
-Employees are not complying with demands from management to manually enter their full data, so you'll constantly run into issues where someone claims ownership of a candidate or a prospective client, even though they didn't enter their recent activity into the system associated with those candidates or clients
-Poor work-life balance - on my team, our partner was celebrating people who worked 70 hours/week, and they are using a report that tracks clicks within the system to determine how much you're "really working", but it doesn't capture all of the work you do on LinkedIn and other browser-based activity (easily 50% or more of the actual job), so you're encouraged to make useless clicks within salesforce to keep your profile active. How backwards is this?
-very poor management of client relationships - meaning account managers are mainly just order-takers, bringing in jobs without qualifying them. There is a low level of trust between between sales and recruiters. Whereas salespeople will post jobs without any details, expecting recruiters to work tirelessly just to receive no feedback for weeks, and to compete with dozens of other agencies in a saturated market. This is somewhat normal in the recruiting world, but steps aren't taken to qualify opportunities, and as a result recruiters are floundering
-Predatory practices within teams, like client and candidate sniping by more senior employees.
-Some lower-level managers (think executive director-level) are inept leaders, speaking unkindly to their team, creating personal grudges, and overall lacking professionalism
-Promises will be made during the interview process that will not be honored when you start working - once you're in, you become just a cog in the machine
