Pros
The people. Even though majority of Glassdoor's incredible, top-performing reps and sales leaders were driven out, I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to work with them. Since I (like all those who were hired) was not given a proper training program to lean on during the early stages of my employment, I learned the ropes myself. It’s hilarious that this is what gave me strong sales skills: like my experience, the new hires that came after me had absolutely no direction from enablement, which opened the door for myself and my colleagues to put our work aside and help new employees. While I had no problem doing it, and it improved my relationships and knowledge of the product (hence my placement of this in the "pros" section), it's inexcusable that Glassdoor's enablement team left these new employees in the dark. But by all means, Glassdoor Leadership: spend a fortune on office plants & tacky decor instead of a strong enablement team.
Cons
Christian honestly had no idea of what we as salespeople did. How much can you appreciate your people if you lack an understanding of their roles? For a company founded on the basis of transparency and that is unique for reviews and ratings, Christian is completely careless to our feedback. On the contrary, I remember when Robert was CEO and would make his way through many parts of the floor when he visited the Chicago office; we all enjoyed listening to some of Robert’s own disco calls that he’d run and record for us, and above all else, it made us feel more united with our leader. I actually recall a time around December when Christian made a (very rare) visit to the Chicago office. A manager from the SMB team put together a presentation on how to connect with CEOs, and Christian was asked to participate as we foolishly thought he could provide some good insight (how dare we think our CEO could offer us feedback and guidance!). To everyone’s surprise, he overwhelmed us with negative comments about how he as a CEO doesn’t like being reached out to and we honestly all left the meeting more discouraged than when it had started. He rushed back into the meeting about 5 minutes after leaving to give us some forced words of encouragement, knowing that he had messed up and trying to put a quick bandaid on it. No one was convinced. Christian, in April 2020 when you thought you were being relatable taking zoom calls in your master closet and garage, when you thought you were being relatable sending in videos of you with your family working from home, you instead should’ve focused your energy on saving your top-performing employees that you would blindside only a few weeks later, or if nothing else, you shouldn’t have lied to us. Thanks for showing us your family, but now we’ve had to face the reality of perhaps not being able to support OUR families during an uncertain time when we were promised that this would not happen. If you still aren’t convinced that he doesn’t value employee feedback, he also mentioned in that same December all hands that he was unsure of his current CEO rating. For any other CEO at literally ANY other company, I’d say that would be surprising but excusable. For a CEO running this very company, the one that is known for its ratings and reviews, the one that says we’re “changing the way people find jobs and companies they love through transparency”… inexcusable.