Jobscan reviews

3.3

58% would recommend to a friend

(37 total reviews)

James Hu

55% approve of CEO

60% positive business outlook

Jobscan has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 37 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Jobscan employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

37 reviews
1.0
Jan 20, 2022

Unqualified, narcissistic CEO

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The company is profitable and provides adequate benefits.

Cons

The founder/CEO lucked into a profitable product but is standing in the way of its long-term success. He has questionable business instincts and is terrible with people. The reviews here are mostly fake or left by newer employees at the company's request. I was asked on multiple occasions to leave a positive Glassdoor review for recruiting purposes. The CEO is the worst kind of micromanager, diminishes employee accomplishments to maintain power, and prefers employees he can manipulate. He bragged about withholding praise from one of my colleagues because he knew they were motivated by his approval. He has offered 2x or 3x counteroffers for exiting employees instead of paying competitive wages to begin with. He disrespected all employees by taking a year-long sabbatical before accusing them of not working hard enough while he was vacationing. None of that is OK. To him, the only good ideas are his ideas. If an idea doesn't work, it's because you did it wrong. And he'll keep asking you to waste time doing it over and over. This review is mostly about the CEO because the company is mostly about the CEO, by his design. But the product is also vulnerable. It's profitable but almost already irrelevant due to advancements made by Indeed and LinkedIn (plus a number of copycat competitors). Would not recommend.

avatar
Jobscan Response
3y
James here, CEO of Jobscan. Since this feedback is quite similar to the previous one (and likely posted by the same person), I will repeat myself here: Very much appreciate you spending the time writing this review. I've reflected on your feedback deeply. I take full responsibility for the turnover we had earlier this year. Honestly, I wanted the company to accelerate so I thought it'd be a great idea to hire experienced lieutenants/executives from outside the company to do so. I was wrong. I was hands-off for a year to see how they'd do. A year later, management's salary expenses 2x and there was no revenue growth after 12 months. It was a negative ROI scenario. The sad part is these executives were likable people but the business metrics simply weren't met. They bonded with their teams so some folks saw them as "good leaders" emotionally when business performance was more important. I learned that the current phase ofJobscan doesn't need executives from companies larger than 150 people. We should be promoting individual contributors from within who're excellent at what they do to become the leaders of the company. And we did exactly that. Since we promoted our senior engineer to be the Head of Engineering, we have greatly accelerated our engineering output. This year, we launched the job tracker, chrome extension, continuous integration/deployment, created fast/slow lanes for much faster launches, rolled out SPA (Single Page Application), and upgraded the main dashboard, just to name a few. In terms of innovation, the job tracker we just launched is an idea of our senior front-end engineer. And it is now a full-blown product on its own. We will also be commercializing another 10% project soon and have several machine-learning initiatives next year. In terms of micromanagement - I prefer not to micromanage anyone as it takes my focus away from the strategy and more important matters. To be frank, yes, I did micromanage for the underperforming individuals, which didn't quite work out so well. At the end of the day, it was a mis-hire from the start and I take responsibility for it. We have since made the following changes: 1. Increased the hiring bar so everyone we hire is a fit and a high performer. 2. Set clear OKRs and goals and I have since being hands-off to give freedom for teams to excel. 3. Changed my mindset to be more of a coach instead of a manager. In terms of trips, I visit Asia twice a year due to family reasons and I wake up at 6am and start meetings at 7am, which is 4pm PT. I don't schedule meetings past 7pm PT unless it's important. Since the wave of turnover earlier in 2022, we have re-hired 10 more talented individuals across engineering, marketing, and data teams. 3 of which were former entrepreneurs themselves. Projects are getting done much faster and revenue continues to grow as the cultural changes seem to be making a difference. Jobscan is profitable again this year and we're already seeing an accelerated traffic growth. 2023 is poised to be an even better year since the world will be in need of our service in this volatile times. I encourage anyone seeing this to meet with our team without my presence. Have a real conversation with our team will offer you much more insights about our future.
5.0
Aug 20, 2021

Tons of potential

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Jobscan is at a great point as a company with a lot of potential to do great things. The core product is 100% profitable and the company is not beholden to any outside investment, yet feels like a start-up with similar (strong) benefits. The core leadership team are newer to the company, but have obviously made a huge culture shift for the better. There is a ton of respect among everyone who works here and I'm constantly blown away by the intelligence and skills of my coworkers. Benefits and salaries are competitive and CEO is committed to improving them as the company grows. Work-life balance is great.

Cons

It's a smaller company, so it's not the kind of place you can expect to make significant position/title advancements until the company grows (which fortunately is the plan)

5.0
Jun 1, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The talented team is great to work with and improvements, optimizations and new products are driving solid YoY growth. I love that I get to work at a company that helps people get jobs! The leadership team continues to bring in new talent that is helping to shape the future roadmap and some of the new products coming up are very exciting and will disrupt the job seeking industry. The products truly help job seekers get interviews faster and using ML and AI, optimizing resumes for each job a member applies for will only get better over time. The CEO is a genuinely a good person who personally cares about his team, which is hard to find these days.

Cons

Long term vision for the company isn't super clear yet but is starting to come into focus. There is still enough resources to address the huge opportunities in the space but company continues to grow the in house talent at a fast pace.

Viewing 25 - 27 of 37 Reviews

Glassdoor has 43 Jobscan reviews submitted anonymously by Jobscan employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Jobscan is right for you.