What is the hiring process like at Mattress Firm?

The company and management has potential, but there is still is some improvements that need to be made. The Interview process wasn’t difficult. As long as you have some cybersecurity knowledge your chances of getting hired is good. You can ask questions and learn from others if you get stuck on a problem.

You pretty much professionally develop yourself time and money wise. It’s not like other companies that invest in their own interns as far professional training and monetary resources . Limited documentation for a new person coming in and trying to understand the environment. I don’t like the practice of keeping people as interns for more than 1 year ( sometimes 2 and 3 years).

Clean atmosphere, no real pressure or micro-management.

Was asked often to work at stores 20-40 miles away. Short help was the reason given. As a new hire i was forced to travel. Others were not.

- Training is thorough - You can learn basic sales techniques

Where do I start? First off, my experience is my own, and your personal experience with this company will likely have a LOT to do with your leadership and the location(s) you work in. Having said that, here's my experience; I have been in sales for decades and have extensive retail management experience going back to 1995. I loved selling mattresses above all else though, because aside from managing a mattress store for years, I knew from personal experience what a good mattress set can do for the quality of your life. That's what made me decide to accept the Mattress Firm Zoom interview, even though I had already been offered two promising sales positions outside of the industry. As it turns out, the manager who did the interview is someone I had worked with in the past. It felt great to see how happy he was to see that I was interested in working there. "I didn't know you were looking! Of course I'll hire you!" A little of that goes a long way, you know? I signed on immediately, because I already knew how to excel in the mattress field and I thought this might be the place to do it. At first? It was great! I was placed in a good store because of my experience and I immediately made an impact, I wasn't made store manager, since I was new to the company and had to prove my worth. But I definitely did! The store went from doing 60-70% to budget every month to exceeding budgets as soon as I came on. In fact, I delivered over 1 million my first full year and led the entire state. I wasn't getting any bonuses... mind you, they ONLY go to the manager, despite me writing and delivering more than him... but I didn't care. I was just happy to be there. I was making great money and helping people sleep better. Yeah, the hours were long, but I knew that going in, and as long as the pay was good? I'll work weekends, holidays, whatever. Just let me earn a decent living. Here's where things took a change for the worse, Much, much worse. The first thing they did was change the commission structure. It wasn't hard to notice, since my paychecks took a DEEP dive immediately. So did the paychecks of every other co-worker I spoke to. THEN... they transferred the good district manager who hired me to another location and brought in another one, apparently to "turn things around?" Let's just say this is where it really hit the fan. I mean REALLY. Just to clarify, I've had a long career and I've worked with many district managers. Some were amazing, some weren't, but I was able to learn and take something away from every single one of them. Until this guy. We'll just call him "Dreads", since I literally dreaded every interaction I ever had with him. From my very first conversation with him until the last, I have personally never met a more arrogant, condescending, smug, passive-aggressive manager throughout my storied career, which is really saying something. On the conference calls he was upbeat, positive and excited, albeit in a very false way. It was very apparent he was putting on a corporate "persona," because when you spoke to him one-on-one it was a totally different story. He was quiet, serious, and NOT friendly whatsoever. My first two conversations with him felt more like interrogations. He was calling me under the pretense of "seeing how things work in this district," but it felt more like he was trying to dig up dirt on the previous district manager. He would somberly ask you a question about "operations" and when you answered there would be this lengthy pause, like he was writing down everything you said. It was extremely uncomfortable. It took me less than 10 minutes to realize I couldn't trust him, and if you can't trust your leadership you might as well leave right then and there. I stayed on, since my experience with the company up until that point had been overall positive. As it turned out, working with Dreads was soul-crushing to the extreme. He never missed an opportunity to make a dig, a subtle insult, an opportunity to let you know that HE was the boss and you were the subordinate. I remember when he came to "congratulate" me for being a million dollar writer; the speech consisted of him bragging about how great he was, how many stores he "turned around" and made successful, blah blah blah. He was SO dismissive of my first year achievement that I naturally assumed that he must have been a million dollar writer multiple times! Turns out he never was. According to him, he WOULD have easily delivered a million, but they just wanted him for management sooooo badly. Right. Keep telling yourself that. He also told me that while I was doing well, he could "bring 4-5 people over here to do exactly what you're doing." He also told me the store SHOULD be doing almost 1 million more per year in revenue, but it didn't because it was "weakly staffed". Mind you, this is while he was talking to a first year employee that led the entire state in sales. He made it perfectly clear to me; "You're not so great, you're just in a good location." Even if you actually believe that, why the hell would you say it?! Aside from that, it was blatantly untrue; I excelled because I'm a professional and I'm good at what I do. At that point, I became completely disinterested in "managing" for this company. I had an opportunity to manage the store time and time again after the manager left, but when I said no they never really pressed me as to why. I would have LOVED to tell them, hence this review. However, even if you have good leadership (which I sure as hell didn't), you aren't going to make any money unless; a) You get into management b) Can make bonuses If you're a lowly "Sleep Expert" like me? Forget about it. I had fellow employees calling me all the time, asking to pick my brain, wanting to be a million dollar writer like me. If they knew just how little I made, considering my success? They'd probably quit on the spot. That's the truth. Here's some more hard truths; you will work long, boring hours here. You will be micromanaged to the extreme. You'll constantly have the specter of "Secret Shoppers" hanging over your head, because with THIS company simply making sales figures is not enough. You have to use their ridiculous and stupid Mattress Matcher and Dream Hub system, which is ALL about them collecting a customer's personal information, NOT in helping them. If you make a sale without using Dream Hub, without using Mattress Matcher? You're a liability and they will eventually fire you, sales figures be damned. Read that again. They will fire you. I personally wasn't in any immediate danger of being fired, but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that people don't want to work 45 hours per week for no money, so they have trouble keeping staff. Speaking of your schedule, be prepared to work EVERY weekend. EVERY holiday, even mundane ones like Presidents Day. This is required, so forget about your 4th of July barbecue because you'll be at work. Not only that, but because Mattress Firm wants to "get a jump on the competition," be prepared to work early and stay late. On Black Friday this year we had to open at 8am. I dragged myself into work and didn't see my first guest until after 11am, but that's okay, it doesn't cost corporate anything to make you stay for long hours. You make a pitiful hourly draw and get paid commission only after you cover that. Even as a successful writer, there were plenty of $1300 paychecks for 90 hours work. This company will find ANY reason not to pay you. Their "big sales" mean zero margin and tiny commissions for you. They have a 120 day price guarantee too, so if the mattress goes on sale for less money the guest gets a refund. Guess whose pocket that comes out of? Yours. Oh, the warehouse screwed up a delivery and the customer is angry and wants compensation? That comes out of your pocket, too. Not to mention they've FURTHER cut commission points and branded lots of inferior items (especially the adjustable bases) under their "Sleepy's" house brand so they can lie about costs and fudge your commissions even further. So... you want to work here, do ya?? Take it from a Million Dollar Writer; DON'T DO IT. You deserve better and even if you don't have a horrible district manager like I did, this company will take your life from you and NOT pay you for it. Period.

If you happen to be the store manager's friends you get getter hours, help meeting your end of year goal, you wont be publicly humiliated, and you wont have to clean the bathrooms.

If you even interview at this store beware. The manager has a history of hiring in order to fill the night shift. That way he and his friends don't have to spend their time in the store when there are rarely customers. I've learned that others have been through the ringer too. Some were fired, some quite, and some got moved to less busy locations. If you do take a position here, whatever you do, don't call out the manager for stealing your customers. You'll find yourself at a slow store or fired. This is a very unprofessional business that is soon to be bought out by one of its vendors. Who knows what will happen to you then.

None—They have a decent social media presence and a recruiting bot named Olivia that provides decent service and gives the impression that the company is in touch with employee experience. I can promise you they're not.

I can't say if the problems I experienced were company-wide or just an issue with my HR leader, but I had a horrific employee experience. So bad that I left without having another job lined up. There is absolutely no onboarding process. In my first week, my peer screen shared her team's chat by accident, and I saw a conversation between her and my leader complaining that I was talking about my previous company too much. During a leadership training, we were asked to draw off previous experience. By the third week, my leader had told me that a PowerPoint I had completed was "extremely sloppy and the formatting was pathetic." I admit I had made an error by duplicating one bit of info, but I was not given any guidelines or standards for PowerPoint formatting expectations. Additionally, I showed my draft to both my leader and peer and confirmed the vision I was designing, and they both agreed. By week four, my peer had accidentally screen-shared her teams again, and this time, there was a screenshot of me in another leader training meeting in a chat between the two of them. I finally addressed my concerns with HR and was told that the screenshot of me was just to confirm my attendance in the class. By week seven, my leader asked me to call up my peers from my previous employer to get screenshots of the work we had done there. I told her I was not going to do that, that it was proprietary information, and that I had signed several confidentiality agreements on the work I had created there. She got very upset with me. I was bullied and harassed about something every day. At the end of every day, my spouse asked me what they had done that day to make life miserable. My final straw was when my leader put me on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) and completely lied on the entire document. I pushed back with HR and asked if I could continue my work on another team, but I was told I could not. I could not continue working for an organization with a leader who was determined to get me to quit and wanted me gone so badly she was willing to lie and fabricate information. It's unclear whether these issues were isolated to the talent area in HR or were indicative of a wider organizational problem. I was largely isolated from my peers, and in the four months I worked there, I was not allowed to reach out to other areas of the business or HRBPs to discuss my questions. My interactions were limited to my one peer and leader, leaving me with a sense of opacity and lack of transparency. Finally, the FTC just filed a suit against Temper Sealy, rejecting their plan to purchase Mattress Firm, so I'm not sure how financially secure the company is.