Pros
They do an extraordinary job of selling you on their superiority and growth potential -- as exemplified by their purple and green color scheme. One readily believes Anthony Hsieh is an entrepreneurial genius, his team of managers are best in class, and everybody from capital markets financiers to lavoratory maintenance are "all-in", giving their best, most sincere efforts because they believe in the vision. Indeed, there are a large number of highly skilled, driven and genuinely nice individuals employed there who come to work each day giving their sweat, blood and integrity to make a difference in what is for most people their most important investment.
Cons
None of these people seem to last very long at loanDepot. I, for example, like many others, came with an impressive financial services pedigree from across the country to work there after the most demanding and stressful interview process imaginable. At the highest levels, they convinced me it would be a long-term opportunity to build a department, create processes and products the way they are supposed to be done, and in general do the best work of my career. Instead, I was thrown into a situation with a long list of deficiencies to fix, and fix within a month, without any staff: an unusable website, a new web server that had taken three years to develop, a total lack of marketing content, no usable sales scripts, a long list of half-completed advertising and branding initiatives, and a mind-boggling number of expensive vendor contracts set to expire soon without any product extracted from them. On top of this I found my job as Content Director widened to include graphic designer, UI/UI/SEO expert, web developer, software development consultant, webmaster, corporate rebranding specialist, video equipment manager, requisition expert, drafter of vendor contracts, mortgage subject matter expert, visiting dignitary to satellite offices, self-promoter, and in-general errand boy to every executive in the place. Unfortunately, only my manager perceived these duties to be my role. The employees and vendors actually doing most of those jobs were incompetent to her, and I should simply take their roles away (all while having so many things dumped on my plate on a daily basis it would be mathematically impossible to do them all). In heroically trying to navigate this, I was treated to every bad-management practice in the textbook, from having every single thing I did second guessed, to throwing me under the bus in the first week with the company president and chief legal counsel, to being ruthlessly held accountable for unarticulated direction on a daily basis, to always being thrown off track from trying to tackle the job systematically (for example being given a high-level work assignment to complete during employee orientation), to never being given actual approval for anything I brought forward even though I was warned repeatedly of the dire consequences for not getting the tasks done, to having company direction and personel plans change daily, to, worst of all, the practice of gaslighting, deliberately trying to make me feel as if I am insane and/or mentally challenged by creating lie after lie to "manage" me. Despite all of this, I was shocked to find myself terminated within 40 days for no stated reason at all. Maybe it was the President calling me a "good hire" at my first staff meeting with him, maybe it was my reluctance to try to convince the legal department that there was no marketing content on the company website. I don't know. I know it was a gift to have this experience, and to be given release from it, but it seems incomprehensible that such self-destructive business practices could go on in this day and age. It's very sad.
