Pros
A lot of reviews seem to be from disgruntled former employees, so as a former employee, I'd like to give a positive perspective on this company :) - Guild has an amazing mission, and having previously come from a large corporate company that only cared about profits, I was really inspired by the altruistic work that Guild is doing and was energized to come to work every day to support said mission. Is Guild a for-profit company? Yes. But is the intent still to allow workers to gain a higher education and opportunities for advancements in their companies? Absolutely. Also the founder (Rachel) really really cares about the company and its people. Hard stop. - Guild provided personnel with a PLETHORA of benefits that people don't seem to acknowledge: Really good health insurance (low deductible plans were free and high deductible were like ~$20 copay?), flexible work schedules, a lot of PTO (I will circle back to some commentary on this one), bereavement leave, 14 weeks of parental leave, free mental health services, 1-2 hours of free legal advice, disability leave, a free book from a local bookshop every year, a solid monthly grocery/internet/phone bill/whatever subsidy, random Guild swag (not just during onboarding), holiday gifts, a subsidy to buy your office set-up, budget for conferences, ~$5,600 for internal personnel to partake in educational courses / get a degree, and several more I can't think of right now. - Unlike some companies that demand you work the exact 9-5 hours, Guild was generous about letting personnel have flexible work hours, as long as they got their work done. At my old job, it was hard to find time for dentist/doctor/vet appointments, but at Guild I never had to worry about that. - A lot of folks have criticized the unlimited PTO policy changing to 4 weeks (with only 2 consecutive weeks), but I would like to add the context that people were abusing this policy, so Guild was forced to crack down. Truthfully, when I needed more than the two consecutive weeks, or more than 4 weeks total, I worked with my manager to schedule more time but made a game plan for when the work would get done. I did the same with my team and it worked out great. - Guild was really great about giving a voice to its personnel. Some people may disagree with me on this one, but I was truly shocked when I joined the company and saw how openly people could express their opinions on Slack. At my old company, it would not have been tolerated if you talked about politics, religion, pay, social issues, complaints on management style, complaints on how events were run, etc. I think a lot of folks at Guild took it for granted that we were able to talk so openly about social issues, post about our personnel lives in certain Slack channels, complain about lack of transparency in the Guild All-Hands, etc. In my opinion, personnel were given a lot of freedom of speech in this regard. - Guild uses a lot of newer / modern technologies. I have audited so many companies that use old, outdated, and frustrating technologies, so I have a great appreciation for Guild's infrastructure. - Guild was really good at employee recognition and was constantly praising the work of different teams - I've noticed that on a lot of the reviews, people complain about management's bad strategic direction, lack of transparency, etc. The only thing I will add here is that it's easy for people down in the weeds (myself included) to be unable to see the high level view of a company and critique certain decisions. For instance, I was part of the layoffs in May of 2024, and while it was a bummer to leave Guild, I recognized that Guild needed to recapture the revenue from those terminated personnel's salaries in order to have a certain amount of money on its income statement as part of its next valuation. If Guild decides to go public someday, this is critically important. While it was hard to get laid off, I am happy that this allowed the company to stay afloat and successful and allowed my coworkers to continue to have jobs - Guild does pay *most* positions really really well and is constantly comparing salaries to industry standards and making adjustments
Cons
- Senior leadership required each department to spend a lot of time on reporting and administrative work that didn't seem to be used - The OKR process was convoluted and didn't reflect the objectives of each department. Managers were required to update the progress of projects monthly in a really confusing system. However, I think this was part of the growing pains of maturing a company. - While I do really appreciate that Guild required frequent checkins between reports and supervisors, these were required on a weekly basis, and that was a big time commitment for trying to get work done. Not a big deal, but I think these could have been made monthly. - The member support / coaching team was paid pretty poorly. Just like with teachers, this is very taxing job, and I think that their hard work and mental stamina should have been compensated accordingly.