Glassdoor

Cons

The reason I was able to achieve even one thing at Glassdoor, is because there is no standardized sales process nor a true enablement team. A sales rep has to hope for a leader who knows how to sell, and that rep had better be a curious person who wants to learn and be willing to lean on your peers.

Glassdoor is such a difficult sale with prospects usually upset about ratings, calling it a “rant site”, saying people don’t look at jobs on Glassdoor, claiming users just want to see negative reviews. Those preconceived notions were very hard to sell against.

Thankfully, with the help of my great colleagues, I was able to develop my own sales process that helped me overperform and begin seeing success.

Eventually, mastering that process and building great internal relationships allowed me to get into leadership where I truly got to see the stunning level of incompetence and miscommunication up close.

I’ll try and go department by department.

I would post a gif of a tumbleweed for sales enablement if that was allowed. We were each other's sales enablement team. Ironically, not having a true sales process - one where someone can ask “What is the Glassdoor sales process?” and get a very quick, short, concise answer - is what forced me to fend for myself and learn to sell. Enablement was really good at delegating what should have been their responsibilities to the reps and managers. They were also great at being able to string together what few sales events we did have because there was very little budget pretty much constantly.

Why didn’t Glassdoor commit to building a world class sales enablement team and roll out a standardized sales process for reps and managers to follow? I’ll never know. But they’re still employed so they must be doing something right.

The product itself barely changed in four years. Eventually prospects will stop falling for “we have more traffic this year” when they ask what’s changed since the last time we tried to sell them Glassdoor. Once every year, the product team would tell us about very small changes they were planning to roll out at some point within the next five years. I can’t wait to see the color of the button in 2027.

I’m not sure where to start with Sales Development. The name of the org is Sales Development. Develop sales reps. Nurture them. Don’t bully them into low paying jobs that are somehow even harder and more work than hunter and growth roles.

The SDR org was a total mess that rewarded good SDRs by “promoting” the most promising inbound reps into a tier where high Enterprise reps belittled them, refused to flip their meetings, and blamed them for any shortcomings that they refused to do anything about themselves.

The amount of amazing AEs that came through that org did so through their own sheer will and talent, and frankly not knowing their own value - because these reps could have been making 2x the pay at literally any other sales company.

Sales ops is rough at almost every company but I cannot fathom a more inept ops team than the one we had at Glassdoor. Their hallmark was consistently building out nonsensical books, bizarre quotas, and never, ever, ever doing any data refreshing. Here’s an idea - consult the actual front line reps before building out plans that 70% of the reps are going to miss. They finally managed to bring in one very awesome person, who we all loved, and I hope she still has a job. I can’t say her name but anyone reading this knows who I’m talking about. Wingman of the Year and well deserved.

Senior Leadership, I just wish I could understand what value you bring. It honestly feels extremely silly that all of the conversations about promotion paths, job families, and arguing attainment vs. competence were something that occupied so much of our time and energy - and they just took it away from us with a snap of their fingers. When I say senior leadership, I mean sales senior leadership. And I mean VP level and up. I could not have asked for a better director who cared more about our people - but above the director was miscommunication, non-communication, false promises, and patchwork solutions. You and ops combined to set us up for failure. A fiscal year where less than 30% of reps and managers were able to hit quarters. The rep participation rates quarter over quarter were shameful.

Was it the business or the product? It damn sure wasn’t the people - the managers and reps worked tirelessly to try and bring success to an organization that consistently underpaid and undervalued the talent they had. And now we’re all gone. What a shame.

The CEO. Where to begin. When I started at Glassdoor we had Robert. And while Robert wasn’t the business person some CEOs are, Robert was a human being. He spoke his mind. He spoke with conviction. He was entertaining. I found myself wanting to work for him. That’s the very least a CEO can be. When he spoke, everyone listened. At sales kickoff, he was a highlight every year. He even came out to get drinks with the sales team despite his insistence that “sales people are the absolute worst.” Robert, cheers man. I hope you’re enjoying time with League of Legends - but when the decision was made to sell to Recruit, it seems like the writing was on the wall.

Enter Christian Sutherland-Wong. When he wasn’t talking about his mum in literally every single all hands address, he was hiding. I don’t know where - maybe hanging out with Indeed executives. He showed up to the Chicago office maybe 2 or 3 times total in his entire tenure as CEO of what used to be Glassdoor. He showed zero ability to command an audience, bragged to us about inventing LinkedIn’s corporate culture when he was there, and did not remotely understand what we do on a daily basis. It’s no surprise he was able to make the call to fire all of us so quickly.

I remember (maybe 3-4 months ago) when he came to Chicago to speak to our sales team as we trained our reps how to effectively reach out to CEOs at companies in our books. He stumbled his way through a couple sentences of complete gibberish before exiting the room to a bunch of confused faces. He then came back and read off some words that seemed like they were straight off a marketing slide. He was always saying “people need us now more than ever” as he was putting GD on a hiring freeze of its own and eventually, swiftly, and without warning liquidating the jobs of 300 talented, wonderful people.

Not more than a month ago, Christian told us that this was the beginning of our journey of becoming the best tool in the world for job seekers. Either he didn’t know that this was coming, while COVID was already in full swing mind you, or he’s just a liar. Either way the lack of transparency at a company that stresses transparency for OTHER companies has forever been shocking. CEOs are supposed to be able to navigate current times and be able to set up a company for the future. Apparently asking Christian to look a few weeks into the future was too tall of a task.

He’s had a very eventful run as CEO of what used to be Glassdoor. If his mission was destroying a company in less than a year, then kudos to you my friend. Job well done.