1. This company advertises itself as a start-up in Cebu City, when in actuality their HO in India has been active for several years now. Despite this, they still attempt to lure applicants in with promises of a start-up company environment.
This is false. They will say promise "full creative control" while they have India Head Office control every single word you write, from the titles to the actual topic itself.
2. They will advertise the fact that you will be allowed to write about a wide variety of things, from celebrities to technology. Again, this is not true. There are only three brands that have that kind of creativity attached to it, and you have to be a special kind of writer or lucky to be assigned to those brands.
Chances are, if you apply there, they'll stick you in one of the template sites where you'll have to write business forms for the entire duration of your career there.
3. Management in India is terrible, and there seems to be a lack of a proper communication channel. They micromanage, and nitpick at the most irrelevant things, justifying all of their actions by saying "SEO" or because "keywords". They don't understand the idea of abstract concepts, and they change instructions every 2 days.
They refuse to utilize common time saving methods, such as automatic calculation on Google Sheets, and require that you input the data yourself. Also, time tracking software installed on your laptop.
4. Here's a con for you. In 4 months, 3 managers and 1 HR Manager have resigned. People are resigning left and right. There were about 70+ employees in June/July, by August/September, it's dwindled to about roughly half. I'll leave it up to your imagination to think what those kinds of numbers mean for a company.
5. There is so much unnecessary drama with some of the very incompetent people they put in charge. One of the acting "HR" staff members is very unprofessional, and spends company money like it's hers, buying things for other employees, and takes them out to lunch on the company card without proper clearance from higher management.
6. The compensation is absolutely no enough for the amount of work they give you. They claim to give "competitive salary", and berate you if you discuss salary with your colleagues. This is a tactic meant to make sure that nobody finds out that everyone is being paid the same paltry amount.
They also give you more work to do without amending your job description and contract, so your pay stays the same, with the added benefit of more stress. Unreasonable daily quotas, pushing the employees as though they think of them as nothing more than keyboard monkeys.
7. The CEO is constantly paranoid about the fact that everyone is out to get him, and views suggestions as a personal attack on him. This has resulted in some very good people resigning, despite the fact that they had the company's best interests in mind.
