What is the hiring process like at Salesloft?

The people at the company are its greatest asset and the reason you want to come to work, more than an above-average salary, unlimited PTO, a great tech stack, or huge opportunities to grow alongside amazing engineers, even though there’s a lot of tech debt.

Last two years old CEO was dismissed overnight and an all-hands meeting was called just five minutes later to announce it. Engineers who had been with the company for over five years were laid off in the same maner, just five minutes after the layoff announcement on friday! Over the past six months, many senior staff have left, likely anticipating this scenario. The company promotes its “Great Place to Work” certification and core values, yet simultaneously replaced over 100 people with cheaper outsourced teams that didn’t undergo the same rigorous hiring process, even though its greatest asset is its people working here. As engineers, we see a ton of bugs reported daily in our channels. Instead of investing in support and implementation engineers, the new strategy is to hire as many salespeople as possible and lean on low cost outsourcing. I hope this won’t lead to the company’s downfall, most negative Trustpilot reviews cite bugs and poor support, and this problem will only worsen under the current approach.

The people at the company are its greatest asset and the reason you want to come to work, more than an above-average salary, unlimited PTO, a great tech stack, or huge opportunities to grow alongside amazing engineers, even though there’s a lot of tech debt.

Last two years old CEO was dismissed overnight and an all-hands meeting was called just five minutes later to announce it. Engineers who had been with the company for over five years were laid off in the same maner, just five minutes after the layoff announcement on friday! Over the past six months, many senior staff have left, likely anticipating this scenario. The company promotes its “Great Place to Work” certification and core values, yet simultaneously replaced over 100 people with cheaper outsourced teams that didn’t undergo the same rigorous hiring process, even though its greatest asset is its people working here. As engineers, we see a ton of bugs reported daily in our channels. Instead of investing in support and implementation engineers, the new strategy is to hire as many salespeople as possible and lean on low cost outsourcing. I hope this won’t lead to the company’s downfall, most negative Trustpilot reviews cite bugs and poor support, and this problem will only worsen under the current approach.

I'm fortunate to have spent five years here and got to experience the in-office culture that the company still tries to use to attract new talent. I'm grateful to the people who referred me, interviewed me, and hired me. I consider anything before Jan 2023 to be Salesloft and anything after to be considered Vista as the company I left is not the same place I applied to. - The people. If Salesloft was good at anything, it was hiring amazing people (for the most part). People I would consider long-term friends. Every time there was a layoff or someone left, the company lost a little more light. Coffee with a Loftee was a great way to make connections outside of your dept. - Historically, some managers would assist their team to pursue other ventures within the company and allow access to funds for PDP. This is no longer the case. - The past holiday parties (except the 2023 pizza party, more below) and retreat were incredible. The past gifts were very generous and I still continue to use them. - Benefits were great. Some slowly disappeared later. - my department mostly had good leadership.

First, maybe remove "6 weeks @ 6 years" as it has become very clear the new, Vista ELT doesn't want to pay out these bonuses and 6 weeks PTO. How has it become clear? Anyone close to sabbatical is put under a microscope, and they look for any reason to let you go, even after you agreed to the conditions. You have paid for your whole sabbatical upfront (which they require you to do), they will find something. All the original ELT is gone. They aren't looking to backfill key C-suite or VP roles. But the new ELT won't hesitate to bring in their buddies from past companies to fill in these roles they pushed tenured lofters out of. Transparency is gone. The "acquisition" of Drift was a fun LinkedIn moment, as they are both owned by Vista. People would ask important questions in Zoom chat only for them to be ignored so the ELT can speak on what food they enjoyed in Mexico. DEI doesn't seem to be as important as they say it does. They lay off lots of key members of these groups and the remaining people are left scrambling to rebuild. The culture is non-existent. If you are applying here for the culture, I'd recommend reconsidering. Pay is below market value even in cities/states that are normally quite low. Constant offshoring. I have nothing bad to say about my colleagues outside the USA but it has become very apparent they aren't keen on hiring within American borders anymore. Doom and gloom emails from new CEO. Morale is 6 feet under but Vista ELT doesn't see it. ELT does not care about the US team anymore. In 2023, Mexico and London both had full holiday parties where Vista C-suite executives would attend. The US team? If you were in Atlanta, you got a pizza party and no visit from the Vista C-suite. I wish I was joking about the pizza party. If you lived outside Atlanta, you got nothing. Managers will turn on a dime depending on the mood of the new ELT. You could have a great relationship one day and be in a hostile manager/employee one-on-one the next. Managers will say they will help you or have "great plans for you" only to trap you in a role with no personal development resources. Some people constantly bad-mouth past employees like it's high school or try to bring up former lofters and make newer employees feel left out. HR is basically useless. If there are inappropriate advances from managers to employees, HR and senior managers will sweep it under the rug.

Phenomenal product but that’s it

Company culture is truly a farce. They say you are family but will lay you off without blinking. Recruiter lied during interview process and stated that over 90% of reps hit their revenue target - I was employed for over a year and saw first hand that 75% of the commercial reps didn’t hit quota. Not even close.

Used to have a strong culture New office is nice Product is good Some great people are still there

Silent layoffs - you won't know someone has been let go until you check slack and they're deactivated No career progression - constant freezes in hiring and promotion Culture is not what it used to be - everyone is terrified of being let go & trying to jump ship as a result of this Not a place you want to join if you hope to stay for more than a year

The only reason I’m giving this company 2 stars is because of the people. You’ll be surrounded by amazing colleagues who are unfortunately not responsible for the strange decisions made by upper management. You will have a great benefits package with remote possibility, which is great.

Despite your best efforts and strong performance, there are several issues that undermine job security and managerial effectiveness: You'll be held to strict metrics, but even if you meet or exceed them, there's no guarantee you won’t be laid off if management decides you're a target. Managing multiple critical projects may not protect you from layoffs, as their importance can be diminished by higher-ups. Positive feedback from internal performance reviews and company surveys doesn’t ensure job security; you might still be selected for layoffs despite strong peer evaluations. You’ll face diminishing autonomy with frequent changes in team priorities and deadlines, which can compromise your effectiveness. Is really hard to mantain people's morale with 0% of salary increases, doing more with less. You will love the people but the new transtition is impacting employees morale really hard.

I'm giving them two stars because I did genuinely enjoy the people that I worked with, specifically my direct manager.

That said, a lot of the "we are family" and "best play to work" stuff is a facade. I asked a lot of questions in my interview about potential for lay offs and was told not to worry at all and that there's been nothing on the horizon. Well 3 months after working there (still on ramp) they did a big round of layoffs. I had received nothing but positive feedback from my team and manager and had a really good pipeline. I also had a $0 quota at the time so this was NOT due to performance. This was a "last one in first one out" situation. I was just a number and had a hard time not thinking all of the "we treat our employees like family" speeches I had been given during onboarding is fake. I wouldn't recommend working there at least not right now.

* Good salary and comp. package for my experience level * Learned a lot about my team's domain * Good company values * Presence of a lot of people who had done really well for themselves at the company and were good to be around

I think the preview of coming attractions was immediate for me- in the few weeks between interviewing and starting, two engineers were leaving the company and a third was moving to another team. So from the start it was kind of clear that this team was a place where Salesloft careers go to end. The mix of personalities on the team clearly just didn't work. I think too many people had tried to get off this team already because nobody was really allowed to switch to a different team. There was basically no trust and very little communication among team members. Things were often tense in meetings and a manager would ask "Who can volunteer to do this?" and we'd all sit in silence for prolonged periods of time. It was sad and pretty immature but nobody wanted to feel taken advantage of. I think the philosophy was generally that the engineers should be left to themselves to figure things out without a project manager. After one of the rounds of layoffs that affected a manager and two of the developers, there a new manager who came in and could immediately tell things weren't right after sitting in a few meetings. I think this was around the time of the annual employee survey where we all answered that we would move to a different job if offered the same salary. They decided having an in-person sync week might fix things. It was actually really nice to meet in person and I had a nice time, but afterwards things were just back to normal. I felt bad because clearly the manager had to get the budget to do all that when it was already kind of a lost cause with most of us having a foot out the door. And also in an alternate universe where we all lived in Atlanta and came into the office together, maybe it could have worked. Relations with other teams could also be pretty rough. At one point we needed help with some database task, and someone on the database team wrote us a script that would accomplish it over time. Great! We kept them updated on progress. A couple months later it blew up in our faces and they came back and asked why on earth we would even consider doing such a thing. There was also an on-call requirement that was a real pain. (Though I found out about it after I started; it was never mentioned during the interview process.) I never got any training or guidance on it, nor sought any out, hoping it would never come up. Typically it was something like a queue getting overloaded, and after the regular engineers played hot potato for an hour or two, one of the People Who Knew things would eventually get on the incident zoom and be able to fix it. One of the reasons the People Who Knew things were so effective was that they had so much social capital with the company and had been there since before covid made everything go remote. So they could risk messing things up by accident and they would have been forgiven. I never felt like I got to that point. Also, unfortunately a lot of my education here was (mostly trying and failing at) figuring out how to navigate the company and was not really transferrable in any way.