KnowBe4 reviews

Even if you are desperate for a job, being jobless and homeless is better than working here. The pay is absolutely laughable. $49,000 base salary for a hybrid work role in Tampa Bay? Complete joke. 2 years ago, selling a $50,000 total deal value (3 year deal) would have gotten you $8,000 ($7,500 + a $500 bonus). Now? Same deal would get you $2,900. The “leadership” here are completely clueless, and do not care about your success. They have no spine to stand up to customers who ask for crazy discounts, but then harass the sales reps to continue calling the prospect until the prospect essentially blocks you. Leadership also encourages mediocrity by playing favorites. As long as you crack jokes and are likeable, they value that more than people who actually want to make money. One sales leader even said to the entire region (after having the worst sales month of the year): “don’t expect this to be a place you will retire from or have a long standing career here unless you are over 55.” and also said “don’t expect this to be a place you will ever make a $90,000 base salary in the near future. Not now, but maybe several years from now.” They also lie about mid year incentive games they push as well. They also have Shark Week once a month with completely unclear instructions. Basically they want you to make demos and close business, then choose random reps to get $50 gift cards. So you could close $10,000 in business that week, and someone could close $0, and they could get a $50 gift card. Again, promoting mediocrity and beta behavior. They push hybrid work only locally to Tampa Bay, but with such low pay, how do they expect to get top talent from other top tech companies non the area? They don’t. They expect to be betas and only hire bottom of the barrel employees. The entire culture encourages mediocrity. The CEO even said last year “quota shmota”. Telling reps to sell 3 year deals to make more money. The problem is, it’s nearly impossible to get a large sized account that will pay in full (the only way you can really make money). Annual billing terms only slightly increases your pay. The channel team are useless. If you get a channel opportunity, just expect to never close the deal because the channel reps do zero work. You use a metric software internally for tracking performance and KPIs, which is owned and run by a Scientologist. If you do your research on Hubbard Administrative Technology (Scientology metric analyzing technology), the software used is just that. They also take favoritism to employees in Scientology. Marketing will write to this review and will try to say otherwise, but sales reps have gone to leadership that proves favoritism to reps who are Scientologists. Speaking of which, leadership training is based on a Scientology framework, although it cannot be called that. Don’t listen to the recruiters. The “cash bonus” only netted you $3,100 on top of your base salary for the year, for a mediocre $52,100 before taxes. They also send out several surveys for Best Place To Work. Don’t fall for the rankings. They ask all employees to fill it out, though don’t require it. Even if you mark it as spam, it ends up in your inbox until you complete it. Only the Top 3 reps in sales made over $100,000 after taxes last year. Marketing will reply to this review with a completely inaccurate statement about this, but ask any rep, and only 3 out of 50 reps will tell you they made over $100,000. The amount of micromanaging work they put on you is not worth the terrible salary, especially considering they require you to work 3 days a week in office. If you already have sales experience, don’t work here. This place does not encourage winners, and is not a place for good sales reps.

I've been at KB4 for 6 years and although change is expected, change has made things go downhill. Pay is not keeping up with inflation. I've been keeping up with the reviews on Glassdoor and the bonus structure changed from all sales (including renewals) to new sales, making the bonus much harder to obtain. KnowBe4 seems to think that because they have the option to give bonuses based on performance, that they don't have to pay a fair wage. When in reality, the bonuses we've actually gotten this year are significantly less than they have been the past. Now they are pushing people to come back into the office, which for many is not helpful at all when it comes to productivity. People in the office are loud, people stop and talk to you, it makes it harder to get things done on top of the long commute and losing a ton of time out of your personal life(since for many people, it is too expensive to live near the office - Pinellas county is extremely expensive). Stu has become very out of touch and boasts about his riches in the AMA's (even though in glassdoor review responses they say he "only answers questions he's asked", yeah ok lol). No more COLA adjustments (though yes there are small merit increases), and anyone who has earned stocks in the past, those stocks have ran out and now we are relying solely on our base pay (which is not enough). Since Vista acquired us, it is just not the level of "fun" it used to be. Scary to think what is around the corner with Egress further merging with us. This past year there have been layoffs but they do it in small chunks so just enough to lay low under the radar. As Stu said in one meeting, "first we need to define what a layoff is" and defined it as laying off 5-10 % of the company. But they did lay off people, just in small groups. CSM land is a hot mess with too many accounts to manage and now customers are not getting the level of service they should be getting. CSM is actually paying less of a base pay now as a starting pay than they did 6 years ago. I miss the old days