Handshake reviews

3.2

45% would recommend to a friend

(32 total reviews)

Garrett Lord

43% approve of CEO

40% positive business outlook

Reviews by job title

32 reviews

Reviews about "Diversity & Inclusion"

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1.0
May 18, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Honestly struggled to find a genuine pro here. If I had to name one, it would be that the funding level gives you access to resources you wouldn't expect, it has the budget of a mature company. But that's where the positives end.

Cons

The culture here is one of the most challenging I've experienced in my career. There's a significant gap between what's communicated during the interview process and the day-to-day reality. Leadership plays favorites in ways that are hard to ignore. Policies like the five-day in-office requirement are selectively enforced, certain people are quietly allowed to come in two or three days a week while others are held to the full mandate. Promotions, visibility, and high-impact projects tend to go to those with pre-existing relationships with leadership rather than based on performance or tenure. If you're an external hire, be prepared to feel like an outsider regardless of what you deliver. The growth narrative they sell in interviews doesn't match reality. Career development conversations are surface level at best, and there's no structured path forward for most roles. Meanwhile, the hire fast fire fast approach means the team is constantly churning, which makes it nearly impossible to build momentum or trust. Benefits and total compensation lag behind what comparable companies in the space are offering. When you factor in the mandatory five-day RTO, the gap becomes even more noticeable. From a product standpoint, competitors like Mercor and Scale are meaningfully ahead. It's hard to recruit top talent or feel excited about the mission when the product isn't leading the market.

1.0
Nov 8, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Exciting mission, diversity focus, equity access for all, some really great coworkers and a fun community culture.

Cons

Volatile sales management, gets irrationally upset, flies off the handle at nothing, can’t be fixed. Upper management acknowledges the behavioral problem but won’t do anything about it. Sales management has been hired above their competence.

2.0
Oct 17, 2025

Beware the priorities of c suite

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits and entry level pay are pretty good. Diverse team full of incredibly smart and driven individuals.

Cons

Executives are very obviously beholden to VC investors and behave as such. Short term profitability is prioritized over long term growth and the way they’ve putting all of their eggs in the AI basket demonstrates this. The AI bubble will pop, as did the housing bubble of 06 and the dot com bubble of the 90s and it will take AI companies with it. Because Handshake isn’t creating their own AI model, but rather training models for other companies, there will probably be a delayed impact to the bubble bursting… but there will be an impact nonetheless when the companies hiring Handshake to train their models go under and take their contracts with them. When that happens Garrett & friends as well as their VC investors will cash out and run, leaving lots of Handshakers to deal with the impact. Hope I’m wrong, but uI don’t believe I am. Promotions are few and far between. New teammates are brought on for 6 month contracts and are seldom converted to full time. Even once converted to full time, job stability does not exist. One round of layoffs was just done and everyone is on edge expecting more. Self service product is misleading about its payment structure and cancellation process. Having to defend it when customers reach out about unexpected billing feels unethical. Thoughtless implementation of AI into every workflow has led to a decrease in efficiency, especially around triaging and reporting bugs. Platform-breaking bugs would occur weekly or even multiple times per week. Every newly shipped feature had “unexpected” downstream consequences on other features. Middle management (VP level) was somehow simultaneously entirely detached from the work we were doing while also micromanaging cherry-picked metrics that don’t accurately measure performance.

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