This company puts its customers first - not employees. - Analyst Gusto Employee Review

2.0
Jan 30, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Hot startup, meals, Silicon Valley darling

Cons

Meaningless culture buzzwords, frequent random firings, wrongly attributed culpability, lack of career development, poor leadership, below market compensation, biased Glassdoor reviews (asked to post in your first week), tedious work, poor prioritization of engineering efforts, Stanford duck syndrome, minimal talent

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Gusto Response
10y
Thank you for your feedback on being an employee at Gusto. We would love to understand your perspective better and talk about ways we can improve the concerns you raised. Related to writing Glassdoor reviews, we very much appreciate the feedback and apologies for any miscommunication - it’s intended to be specific to reviewing the interview experience - moving forward, we’ll ask for this feedback in training run by our recruiting team to avoid this misunderstanding. We have grown quickly over the last few months, with 80% of the company having started in the last 12 months. Through AMAs, bi-weekly company meetings, regular surveys and hopefully the ability to speak directly and honestly with leadership or the People team, we hope there are avenues to share these opinions internally as well. Developing our people is a major focus in 2016, and we have only really scratched the surface thus far. We hope you’ll be candid with us internally and reach out, as we’d love to partner with you to improve not only your experience, but the experience of everyone at Gusto, too.

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

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.

9
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