If you get an offer from ASTRSK PR - RUN. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Pros
In office Seamless credit for lunch (although you can't use it during COVID when you're working from home, so you essentially lose out on money that they never reimburse you for and they pocket it)
Cons
Where to even begin? What started off as a hustlin’ and bustlin’ PR agency with a great list of clients, amazing managers and agency culture, soon turned to be a PR professional’s worst nightmare. Let me just say — the turnover is ASTRONOMICAL here. And there is a big reason why: upper management, with their blatant favoritism of employees, gaslighting, manipulation, unequal pay, and so forth. I could write a book about everything that had happened to me at this job in my 1.5 years of being there. But I’ll spare you the details and the tears. After a year at this job, I was suddenly excluded, ostracized, and downright bullied. To this day, I still have no idea why. I went through SO many team structure changes, because of the seriously high turnover. And I stuck through it. I rolled with the punches, and never complained about all the different management I had to go through. Until I began being completely excluded. There was an instance where my team member had scheduled bi-weekly TBs with everyone on my team except for me. When I confronted her about it, my message was blatantly ignored and did not receive an answer until hours later. I was actually the longest standing employee - at 16 months in. At my 16 month mark, I was put on a PIP (performance improvement plan… pretty much the cusp of being on probation, so they have the grounds to fire you) - the CEO/upper management were unhappy with my performance, and they gave me a long list unrealistic KPIs that I had to achieve in two short weeks (one of which was the week of inauguration - when the news cycle was completely saturated, therefore setting me up for failure - what journalist wants to write about some tech startup’s seed funding when Biden is being sworn into office?!) Please note - unless you are so far up the CEO and upper management's butts, you will NOT get a promotion / raise unless you are one foot out the door. Oh, and don’t even think about upper management caring about COVID procedures. When they decided to reopen the office in July 2020, I expressed my concerns about returning. Rather than letting me continue to work remotely, I was given three options. 1) come into the office 2) take a 25% pay cut and work “part time” - Mondays-Thursday or 3) take a leave of absence, unpaid, and reassess COVID in September 2020. I ended up picking option 1. HOWEVER - one of their favorites expressed the same concerns. They did not give her the same options as me, in fact, they gave her a big fat RAISE to come to the office. Yes, a raise. Since the attrition rate is SO high, I was in and out of managers. During my time there, I think I went through 7 different managers. All with different managing styles. The last one I had micromanaged me to no end, and put zero trust in me, with no reason at all. She demanded I send her every client facing note moving forward. When asked to work on a task, no one prefaces the request with a please or ends it with a thank you. You are literally treated like scum. The culture completely went off and died. Teams lock themselves in conference rooms with the doors shut even when they aren’t on calls. No one speaks in the office. In the end, I spoke with whom I reported to about all my concerns and feelings (not feeling appreciated, valued, being grossly underpaid compared to other account executives). Rather than her agree with me, she completely gaslighted me and said my performance has been poor and that she could put me on another performance improvement plan (probation). At that point, my decision was made to put in my two weeks.