Change is needed - Anonymous employee HackerOne Employee Review

#ABSENT SALES LEADERSHIP# Our CRO left us earlier this year due to ‘family issues’ but then took a new CRO job weeks later. This is no coincidence, she could see the decline coming and knew the plan for IPO wasn’t possible. The CRO has never been replaced and the company is hurting as a result. Granted she was a hard act to follow, building the sales org from $10m to $80mm ARR. Leadership now takes the form of a double act of pompous Vice Presidents and a senior manager who was a knee-jerk promotion and now clearly out of their depth. The trio is failing to build a culture for sales success and the numbers show it. Repeating a message about “imposter syndrome in sales” until ears bleed seems to be their only idea to turn things around. When you really need some tangible help and guidance from the top, it won’t be there. Instead, expect to be humiliated in front of your peers with patronising comments like “come on you’re better than that”. What was once a great sales culture is now toxic dictatorship. #REVOLVING DOOR IN SALES# Following our CROs departure, sales has become a revolving door. The CFO left weeks after, as did the Director of Account Management for EMEA who was excellent, EMEA and US Enterprise Sales Directors, the Chief Legal Office and two SDR Leaders! These are just leader positions, I could count on my hands and feet the people that have come and gone this year. There have been so many departures under the incompetent new sales leadership. The impact to culture has been huge. Reps and managers are repeatedly hired into roles they are a bad fit for or unqualified for. People are lied to in the hiring process and what they inherit is not what they expect. People get frustrated and leave, or get fired. This has a real impact on the people that have been loyal and worked hard to keep the show on the road and have been regularly overlooked for promotion. #STAGNATING GROWTH# HackerOne’s days of rapid growth is over. It’s failed to innovate over the years and rests on the merit of its brand. The main competitor BugCrowd has caught up and is in every way an equal rival. BugCrowd frequently win big customers from HackerOne and not just through undercutting price. Customers like BugCrowd’s technology and reputation for customer service. SMB is the biggest declining area, mainly due to several smaller more agile competitors across EMEA bringing new innovation to the marketplace. HackerOne has become arrogant, organisations small and big realise they can get the same or better value at a lower cost! #VIRTUE SIGNALLING AND FAKE MORALISTIC STANCE# HackerOne loves to preach about diversity and mental health awareness, but it should hold the mirror up. The sales organisation is led by 3 white middle-aged, grey-haired men. Females and people of colour are seldom hired, promoted or seldom stay around long. Protectionism is rife. All sales leaders and senior salespeople are white males and its not a coincidence - these decisions have been made at the top of the sales org. We use to have diversity when our CRO was running the show. The current trio of inept sales leaders regularly pretend to be championing diversity, yet last quarter three non-white employees exited the EMEA business, all of whom were well respected and good at their jobs. With constant resignations and firings, HackerOne is probably a contributor to mental health problems. #WELLNESS WEDNESDAY MYTH# The company pretends to provide all employees with time off after 2pm every Wednesday - it’s a myth. The benefit does exist yes, but only for HR people that you’ll often see posting photos on LinkedIn posing alongside their kid of dog. If you’re in an account management, sales role or support sales in anyway, you’ll often be attending meetings on a Wednesday afternoon, or worse, be asked to attend a mandatory internal meeting. You will get the occasional Wednesday afternoon off, but be warned, new hires always complain that their month long onboarding program has mandatory meetings at 4pm on a Wednesday.