Textio reviews about "team"

- Storytelling is a core business strength, and a personal strength of both founders. Ensuring that the stories are fully true is not a priority. - Textio of 2016-2018 had a very strong employer brand, which it has failed to live up to. The current low morale and bleeding of employees is the natural result. - The product vision is fickle, and planning and go-to-market processes lack rigor. Textio stumbled on some early successes (2017 & earlier) based on their hype, but the more recent releases from 2018 onward have failed to achieve similar traction. Leadership continues to use ad-hoc structureless product planning rather than creating robust product roadmaps, clear go-to-market strategies, customer personas, etc. Product vision and roadmapping are woefully underdeveloped. A years-long lack of consistent, seasoned leadership in both the product and marketing groups has compounded this problem. - The company leadership is inexperienced and immature. This leads to all kinds of problems (details below). Engineering leadership lacks startup experience outside of Textio. This has resulted in ineffective planning at any scale in between "here's what we're doing this week" and "here is a 2-year vision document with no concrete commitments or timelines." It means Textio has re-invented their own versions of standard engineering practices (example: their squad-based project development which rests on a typical matrixed organization, but lacks sprints or any other structured way of agreeing on timelines/deadlines, and has no clear mechanism for matching engineers to work). Engineering also has a culture that treats even hints of disagreement as an affront to the hierarchy of management. Decisions made around HR and compensation continually undermine trust. Promises are made, then broken (example: in the wake of #BLM 2020 Textio promised to achieve pay transparency, but later diluted this promise down to the creation of standardized pay ranges for each role). Important deadlines are changed (example: annual compensation updates, always done in December, were pushed by several months into 2021).  Policies disappear and/or are selectively applied (example: rules governing the proportion of people from under-represented groups within candidate pools). There is a career ladder to govern employee growth and promotions, but it's also possible to be promoted or moved laterally into roles not represented in the ladder (surprise!). Without a record of what the criteria for those promotions are, how can anyone have confidence that the criteria are equitably applied?

Leaderships' understanding of how to support new employees with disabilities is lacking but I'm hopeful knowing we have a new DEI Manager and that training will be provided for leadership in all departments.

The combination of challenging product-market fit, hubristic product pricing, and generative AI have completely cannibalized Textio’s use cases. Major ATS and HRIS vendors have built “good enough” generative capabilities that procurement teams prefer. Customers won’t pay 5 or 6 figures for what is now perceived as “nice-to-have,” especially as HR tech & DEI budgets shrink and the conversation evolves in 2025. Despite pivoting to talent management, market perception remains “job post debiaser" Four layoffs since 2020 = instability and constant uncertainty.

I am a new hire and have not experienced anything that would be a 'red flag'.

Speaking from my experience alone, leadership is absent frequently and resurfaces at unpredictable points shifting the team's focus without warning or thoughtful strategies in place. There is extremely poor internal communication. Decisions are often made unilaterally, reactively, and from the top down. As a result, there's a lot of chaos, stress, and lower-quality work output.   Managers I've reported to are very undertrained and rarely give constructive feedback, recognition, or credit. The ones I've reported to lack basic people management experience and haven't consistently demonstrated behaviors like empathy, curiosity, and collaboration. In my department, there's a bit of a mentality of "everyone for themselves." We don't work together on goals, and as a result, everyone is running in different directions at high speeds.   There is definitely a lack of safety and the ability to show up openly. You have to be very careful about the perspectives you share and the questions you ask. To survive, self-censorship and staying out of visible sight is crucial. That's the part that has been hardest for me: feeling like I am not allowed to ask questions, push back, or surface concerns in the open.   Maybe some of that comes from the strong cultural pressure at Textio to always come across as positive. This cultural expectation can make it hard to speak out or share ideas without undergoing cycles of blame and judgment downwards. Several leaders expect you to come to them with solutions, not problems so problems never make it to them.    Certain voices go perpetually unheard at Texito. There's definitely favoritism and cliquiness, usually for those who have been at Textio for many years. Sometimes as a new person, you won't have a voice at the table even if you have useful experience to contribute. I'm often left wondering at the end of rough days why the company hires people they don't seem to trust and won't listen to. While not everyone at Textio feels this way and I want to be careful not to overgeneralize, there is definitely a significant percentage who do. It would be worth investigating culture issues and providing channels for Textios to surface their concerns if the company hopes to reduce the current amount of attrition.  There are not many standardized processes and it's really hard to get answers when you have questions. It can feel like an act of bravery to just post a question or thought in Slack. I've never felt that way anywhere else I've worked. It makes me grateful for past companies, and I did not know what a luxury it was to simply be allowed to speak up without fear or risk. My experience at Textio has been really hard. It's taken a hit on my self-esteem and mental health. I really couldn't have been more surprised since I was a huge fan of the company when joining. I fully expected that I had landed my dream job. I wish I could work on a different team here because there are some good things, but I know I can't sustain the current experience I am having long-term. Who knows? They could figure it out one day, but my advice is to come into this company skeptically so you don't find yourself on a bad team with a manager who won't hesitate to throw you under the bus. 

Leadership will bully and tokenize employees. They seem more worried about how the staff page looks vs actively listening to unique points of view. I felt silenced and it was a shared experience with other people of color. We didn't have a safe place to bring these issues up either. No one feels empowered to make decisions because, at the end of the day, the founders will tell you the “right” way to do something in a public Slack channel that makes you wish you never said anything at all. Both the founders are condescending to their employees and treat everyone as if we are beneath them. During an all-staff meeting, the married co-founders were texting "Are our employees dumb?" while screen sharing just because people asked questions. That quote also leaves out a word that would be against community guidelines... The “favorites” at Textio are the only ones to receive any praise or recognition. On Slack, everyone has their custom emoji with their face that they make for you on the day you're hired. Cute idea, right? Except for when there’s a post shouting out an entire team and 20 people respond with one person's face and 2 respond with another team member’s. Not very inclusive and extremely frustrating when the person with 2 reactions did more than the person with 20. Textio preaches that personality feedback is bad, meanwhile, multiple members of my team received this type of feedback often during verbal 1:1s, never written. Which is another Textio no-no. This is the least productive company I've ever worked for. There are no project managers so nothing gets done efficiently. Leadership and team directors/managers have different timelines and expectations, making everything feel urgent, and creating low-quality work. Textio acts woke, but they are just trying to monetize off of that appearance and can’t even create a safe or equitable space internally. This is extremely harmful because these people think they are educated and informed to talk about this space when they are actively causing more harm. I knew all of this was happening while working there, but since leaving it's become way more obvious how deeply problematic this company is.

Textio is going to be remote through at least the end of 2021. This is the responsible decision, given everything we know. However when other companies start to move back to the office, this will prove to be a con for many people. At a start up, there’s an expectation to “wear many hats” in the work you take on, especially as the company grows. Some people find this exciting and challenging! However for people who Textio throughout 2019, there was an expectation that the role they were hired for would be the role they would be in for the long run. This mismatch between expectations and the reality 2020 created has caused frustration in some case.