Instrument reviews

3.1

63% would recommend to a friend

(24 total reviews)
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Laurel Burton

11% approve of CEO

15% positive business outlook

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24 reviews

Reviews about "Compensation"

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4.0
Feb 2, 2021

Great coworkers, great clients

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Instrument attracts fantastic and talented people. Lots of opportunity to make great, impactful work at this place with some real gems of humans. There is pretty good support for folks who want to grow in their careers. Creative leadership is very strong. Lots of great big-tech clients, if that's what you're interested in. The work and the industry feel stable and exciting. Overall, I feel the company has done a good job improving DE&I efforts for real, and being clear about how that work will impact every piece of the org moving forward.

Cons

Overall vibe, managers, and client/project opportunities vary widely by team and discipline. If you're interviewing, be sure to ask lots of questions to understand the specific landscape you're coming into. Compensation is lower than other agencies and tech companies. Know some friends and colleagues who have been offered lower salaries and titles than at previous jobs. Project management can feel chaotic. Producers often move folks between projects, or split time across multiple projects. Lots of growing pains related to rapid growth and remote work that I expect will continue.

4.0
Jan 23, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Smart, compassionate peers - A very successful agency - Pretty good work life balance

Cons

- Pay is lower than places like WK - Low diversity - Inconsistent and unclear promotions

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Instrument Response
5y
We appreciate your notes of both pros and cons in your experience working with us. We hope that our internal transparency on our representation goals, why they are important and what our goals are, is helpful as you track our progress over the next few years in this area. We also hope that our efforts with the internal Career Progression Framework start to show more consistency and clarity in the path to promotion, so you can feel confident that each leader is being held to consistent expectations before advocating for a team member's promotion. Thanks again for sharing.
1.0
Nov 20, 2020

Like joining a cult and re-living high school all in one experience

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The individual people outside of executive leadership are incredibly wonderful. Instrument has really managed to collect a lot of smart and caring individuals with their rhetoric.

Cons

A real lack of self-awareness around what is an appropriate way to care for employees, or even what is possible within a for-profit corporation. There is a lot of rhetoric around caring for employees through superficial amenities, like a free Headspace account, but in shepherding someone's career they fail spectacularly. They seem to lack any self-awareness around how the drive for maximum profitability limits their ability to be meaningful caretakers of their employees in a personal sense, and frequently they blur the lines around what an appropriate amount of care is or should be. The cult-y vibes that endear you to your employer are leveraged against you when it comes to salary and promotion negotiations if you aren't in the "in crowd". It is generally mystifying how they determine who gets rewarded and how, despite new metrics rolled out nearly every year, with the one constant being the caveat, "at our discretion" allowing them to reward whomever maintains their status quo and rendering everything moot in the end anyway. They have had a lot of cultural issues over the years and always profess a commitment to do better, but in rolling out new standards and processes, C-level executives are never held to those standards, keeping the fundamental problems in place. It is a very fixed environment that claims to be flexible, and you can end up wasting a lot of time there if you don't catch on to it fast enough.

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Instrument Response
5y
Thank you for this feedback and the transparency with which you've shared your feelings about Instrument. As a services organization, we continuously strive for our employees’ experience to be meaningful and authentic, and it’s clear that there were areas in which we fell short for you. Our values and metrics have actually changed very little over the years. As a corporation, profit is indeed a metric for us and important to the ongoing sustainability of the business. That said, it isn’t our only measure of success and we don’t seek to maximize profit at the expense of our work or employee experience. We also measure and share our metrics on diversity, attrition, and employee survey results on equity and inclusion. Again, thank you for taking the time to share about your experience.
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