Good benefits but expect to constantly show proof you're working - Benefits Specialist Gusto Employee Review

3.0
Dec 5, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- 100% remote but can be hybrid or fully onsite if you prefer - everyone i've met is very nice - clear metrics in this role - they want you to grow and have a lot of learning options available (IF you hit your metrics - which can be luck-based depending on your time zone and where you get assigned) - fairly straightforward job and there's almost always a guide/wiki available to make sure you're doing things correctly since it's pretty high stakes to be dealing with folks' benefits. - great benefits with therapy covered, monthly stipends, and no monthly insurance fees (if only you the employee are enrolling). - unlimited/flex PTO (seems to be really easy to use, but not from Nov-Jan 15 in CX umbrella unfortunately, and you can't plan it more than 4/5 months in advance) - progressive company where people seem to care A LOT about doing the right thing, being transparent, and about diversity and acceptance

Cons

- overtime is REQUIRED at the holidays for basically the entire month of Dec. Work/Life balance doesn't exist in this month, although it's great the rest of the year. - you will always be told/have to tell your coworkers on teams upstream and downstream in the form of "tickets" that someone did something wrong. Often you've never even met these people and it feels real passive aggressive tbh, especially since no one except a few leaders seem to know what they're doing. You often have to spend a while understanding what's going on with someone else's work while they're OOO too, which is easy to mess up. - CX academy training was mostly an easy 6 weeks of modules and boring shadow videos which was fine... But didn't help me know how to correctly do my job on a daily basis. More individual repetition working in Salesforce and in carrier portals, or regarding how to best reply to tickets (since that's literally what you do all day sometimes) would have helped me more than anything else. My team was not taught about solving the main situations that come up, which are usually related to some tax doc you've never learned about being incorrect, or someone else's error in the internal system. So much of training was honestly spent on "growing with gusto" where you read generic business articles that are unrelated to your daily tasks in your job - constantly feeling like you're underperforming because they only care about numbers and speed, yet at the same time expect everything to also be PERFECT. You can't have it both ways, Gusto. Give people a chance to read your wikis and slack history to make sure they're submitting their work correctly, or expect us to create tons of errors and do tickets for half of our day, every day. I literally had managers slack me asking why I wasn't performing well enough at 11am when I started only a couple hours ago and had meetings earlier that day... like come on, cool it. - Overwhelming at first, but it gets slightly better over time. Some of the paperwork you have to complete every day in this role doesn't make any sense with the data you're presented with, and it's hard to find the correct way to do your actual job because every single insurance company is different, and some of them get REALLY upset if you don't do everything perfectly. Lots of what you have to work on is something you were never trained on, and some of the insurance companies are real pills to communicate with and act like you're in the wrong, when the fact is they have 10+ email address and portals they want you to use for XYZ situations and XYZ state. It's not always intuitive to keep track of where the correct location is for the order you're working on, which slows you down and works against you. - you're always taking screenshots as you work as "proof" or writing notes in multiple places about what you did, or grading other coworker's work on if they did it right... idk the whole part around these methods seem like busywork and a waste of time, since you can usually find evidence of how an order was submitted in multiple other places, like a portal or pdf. Also tickets and peer reviews can count against you at review time, so it's incredibly frustrating to see a ticket show up (although on the plus side you can mark it as a "false positive" aka incorrect) - no real culture going on outside of corny positivity and icebreakers. once you're on your own it's pretty isolating. There are short daily meetings with updates but that's it, and pretty much only leadership speaks. I literally barely know the people I work with because there are no optional company-sponsored hangouts of any sort like happy hours or games or movie nights, etc, at least not if you're remote (probably because they are obsessed with numbers on this team). They try to keep a cameras-on culture in meetings, but obviously nobody wants to do that, especially when we're trying to meet our daily metrics. it also seems a little... culty at times? Like everyone uses "gustie" lingo and abbreviations and talks about how great it is to work here but I don't get it. - Only thing you can do to familiarize yourself with colleagues is talk in the slack channels (usually they're pretty quiet despite 100+ people in each one), but there are way too many channels, each one with 100-2000 different people in it, with various rules, and it's easy to get lost as to where you should even be posting something. If you do post, often people don't reply outside of an emoji. You can also opt-into a "1:1 coffee chat" which seems pointless since it'll take away time in your day to hit your daily metrics. All of this makes it hard to bond with your colleagues and makes it easy to consider applying elsewhere - Anytime you want clarification after some new rule change, you're constantly told "ask your PE/Captain" (aka Manager and... a peer that did not get a raise to be in that semi-senior role). The timezones and folks being unavailable for meetings or just ill informed can make that difficult - The Salesforce software they use looks dated and is not very user-friendly

Explore other reviews about Gusto

5.0
Jun 10, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Smart and friendly coworkers. Excellent team culture

Cons

Tunnel visions on AI a bit too much

1
2.0
May 20, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The product is genuinely good, too bad the same can’t be said for how they treat the people who sell it.

Cons

Leadership talks a big game about people-first culture but the reality doesn’t match. The Chicago office expansion felt like a poorly thought-out experiment, new hires were brought on without a clear long-term commitment, and layoffs came without warning, leaving people blindsided. Crossing a billion dollars in revenue and still cutting employees sends a clear message about where workers rank on the priority list. Remote work flexibility is also a glaring weakness. For a company selling HR software to modern businesses, their internal stance on where employees can work is surprisingly rigid and hypocritical. The “flexibility” messaging is mostly optics. The broader concern is the AI roadmap. The automation push feels less like an innovation strategy and more like a slow wind-down of the workforce. Employees aren’t blind to it, it creates anxiety and erodes trust. The culture of transparency they promote externally is largely a facade internally.

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