Pros
The people doing the incredibly difficult work in AHR were amazing to work with!
Cons
Working as a Student Safety Specialist involved monitoring disturbing content for 8 hours daily. The psychological impact of this work is real and unavoidable. While the work itself is important (I stayed for years for this reason and this reason alone), the company provided very little mental health support for this mentally taxing role. The lack of resources to cope with the trauma exposure made this role even more difficult than it ever needed to be. Management lacked ANY relevant experience in content moderation or trust and safety, which resulted in unclear expectations and inconsistent decision-making. The company as a whole operates like a "good ol' boy network"—certain people advance without merit while others are systematically overlooked and undervalued. This created a two-tiered toxic culture of insiders and outsiders, where your opportunity for growth depended on social standing rather than performance. Further, the AHR managers didn't seem to understand that the department operates within the trust and safety space—decisions and policies weren't tailored to the realities of the role or the specialized needs of the people doing this work. Communication was very poor—goals and priorities shifted constantly and arbitrarily without clear direction from leadership. These changes rarely reflected genuine business necessity; they seemed driven by management making decisions based on what they thought they should be doing rather than understanding what actually needed to happen. Those outside the inner circle were often left in the dark about these shifting priorities. Pay is significantly below industry standards for the role and experience level. The combination of low compensation, high mental demands, lack of support, and poor management created a culture of burnout. Notably, every person I worked with who left the company cited burnout as their reason—this pattern speaks volumes about the extremely toxic work environment. Ironically, inadequately supported content moderators likely compromise the very student safety the company claims to prioritize.