Pros
- If you stick around long enough you will become great friends with the people around you. The people you meet at Yelp will be your friends throughout your career - Great Benefits package, Free Healthcare, Gym Reimbursement (Up to $60), Pre-Taxed Commuter Benefits, 401k, Employee Stock purchase plan - The managers I had were great at holding reps accountable and teaching reps how to be good at the job while also being down to earth - Great happy hours and camaraderie (Expect to go out and drink with your team/neighborhood anywhere from 1-3 times per month) -Fully Stocked Kitchens (Which is good because if there was not, since the pay is so low, some of the employees would probably have to get a SNAP card) -Craft Beer Kegs on the 16th Floor -Excellent 2 Month Training Program where you will learn how to sell (If you are good at selling Yelp Advertising you will be good in any sales role) - I learned how to use Salesforce and made many effective vetting reports (Until AR came along of course) -Growth Potential to Management and Mid- Market within 12-18 months is reasonable (But be sure to be in the top 5%-10% of reps) - Good Work Life Balance Do not expect to be working over 40 hours a week here) - When applying for careers opportunities outside of Yelp some companies will love the hustle that you have put in at Yelp
Cons
- The job itself is very monotonous (Unlike what the recruiter and training manager will tell you, you are not making open/warm calls these are cold calls) -If Mom and Dad are still paying for your rent and other living expenses you might be able to stomach how much you actually make here. A $40,000 starting salary is not enough to cut it. The Account Executive role is a sales role that excludes the words On Target Earning's in the job description (OTE... most sales jobs have that in the description), which makes sense because a vast majority of reps are not hitting target month-in-month-out. Also reps who are promoted do not see much of bump in pay, only a mere bump in title. In conclusion you do not have to look over the river and through the woods to find a company that is willing to pay you noticeably more - The product is painfully ineffective for a vast majority of businesses that you sign up. If you sign up 10 businesses maybe 1 or 2 of them will actually like the product, the other 8 will probably hate it and cancel, or stop paying altogether and sign up for TrueAccord (That's Yelps outsourced collection agency by the way). Towards the end of my tenure at Yelp I was actually starting to feel sorry for the businesses owners that I signed up. At times I basically felt like a scam artist looking for someone gullible enough to give me their credit card and would pray that they would atleast pay their first bill (So I would atleast get paid). If you are a purpose driven person and not purely a money driven person you might find it hard to last here. Yelp also makes it very difficult to understand the effectiveness/ROI of the advertising program by having a heavily watered down analytics report (more watered down than the Vodka bottle I would steal from my parents in High School). The business owners account is not even willing to point out unique traffic to business owners (so the 18 Clicks a Business had to their Yelp page last month could have been from 10 unique people). Management knows that the product is questionable and has a high churn rate so they resort to sending mass emails of "success stories" or " #YelpAdsWork". In the NYC Office you cannot even sit in a bathroom stall without seeing a "Success Story" to your Left, Right, and In Front of You. It's kind of sad in a way, if the product is so good you shouldn't have to spoon feed it to us, we should already know. - Account Recommendations (AR) has severely limited the reps ability to learn the power of Salesforce and understand their territory/accounts. AR was dubbed as a silver platter serving up the hottest leads, but in reality calling a lawyer who has been dead for the past 8 years who happens to have a Yelp page or a B2B Logistics company who has no business being on Yelp is quite the contrary. AR has gotten so bad that managers (Who have full access to Salesforce) are resorting to emailing reps Vetting Reports or Pinging Reps potentially hot leads. Although a majority of reps have an issue with AR, upper management seems to have turned a blind eye to any concerns. - Although some companies will LOVE your Yelp background on your resume other companies will be completely turned off by it.