Pros
• Marketing team excels at creating a positive company image, despite the reality. • Compensation and benefits would be competitive if the company were a successful organization with a positive structure for operations. The pay structure incentivizes billable hours, and would be awesome if achievable, but poorly scoped projects prevent that from happening.
Cons
• Sales-Development Disconnect: Projects are routinely sold before anyone truly understands the client's needs or the technical complexities involved. This often leaves development scrambling to fulfill unrealistic and, often times, unfeasible promises made in sales. • Exceptionally High Turn-Over: Collectiv is a mix of full-time employees and contractors, both of which have a very high level of turnover. This makes resourcing for projects difficult, and requires frequent knowledge transfers that typically fall short. This can also be unsettling for clients on current projects who are frequently seeing new faces and having to trust their project to a stranger. • Workload balance: Employees are frequently spread across several projects at once without proper time allotment. An employee may have 5 or 6 projects but only be allowed a few hours a week to work on each, resulting in diminished quality of their deliverables, lowered billability, and the potential for “working for free”. Leadership’s answer is to give them more projects to boost billability, but this results in even further diminishment of quality and increase in mental duress. • Leadership Development: There's a distinct "bottom line first, employee and client well-being later" vibe from leadership. It is difficult to feel supported in this environment. In summary, the company has a great public image, but the reality can be...disappointing. The compensation might be tempting, but be prepared for some serious organizational chaos and a leadership team that could use a refresher on business operations and client success.