-WebFX is fiercely protective of their positive culture, and has every right to be for building cohesive teams, but this blunts what constructive criticism leaders choose to offer individuals to the point it’s a mystery whether personality or work ethic is what secures your future here.
Coaches will praise — and other times try to fix — every little thing to seemingly fulfill a quota during the early honeymoon period, until they must focus on a newer hire.
-No matter how lovely and fun it looks with the way WebFX markets for themselves, don’t just fall for it. This will always be a fast-paced agency where you will need to put your head down to keep up. This issue goes deeper than the multiple incentivized 5-star reviews these past few months will say is the only con, which is more about the marketing world in general.
If we’re actually talking about this organization, I believe their obsession to be productive can sometimes get in the way when it’s time to demonstrate to clients that their business process and image they’d like to present are really understood.
I’d rather think optimistically that it’s not like marketers don’t care when they don’t go beneath surface-level knowledge of these things; it’s more like they can’t within the time blocks they’re shackled to. The quantity-over-quality system that demands going through the motions is embedded from the very top and has led to some rocky starts from this urgency to phone it in.
And as much as you’d think being more considerate is a valid approach, when a leader’s first remarks upon reviewing a marketing deliverable are “How long did this take you?”, rather than any acknowledgement about how the client and their goals were understood — I can’t frame the soullessness at times any other way.
This environment doesn’t prepare adequately for a company-side career where enthusiasm for and familiarity with the work are going to get you through the doors elsewhere, and maybe that’s the whole point.
I’m exhausted of feeling pressured to put forward half-baked ideas that’ll run counter to clients’ goals of being thought leaders and to treat content creators like they’re one of a million monkeys at one of a million typewriters, and the way we wind up draining clients of more budget when we offer to think harder only as a last resort.
-While it’s totally reasonable that being remote can never equate to an in-office experience, contractors miss out a lot on benefiting from the client campaigns that do go well and they play a part of. They are instrumental to producing website copy and media that’s so crucial to the success of SEO, but are blind to most results of their work, disconnected from who they serve and the agency’s growth, and get no paid time-off for working a 40-hour week until they’ve spent 1-2 years (understandable a bit with the level of turnover).
To provide another perspective, most contractor roles rightly are asked to demonstrate their content creation skills during the hiring process. In-house marketers as candidates are mainly evaluated for cultural fit and interpersonal skills to navigate meetings with, while learning the ins-and-outs of website design and campaign success on their feet.
Despite the mountain of applications WebFX receives, and the occasional periods of short-staffing, they are still incredibly scrutinous looking for new grads who aren’t aware of the value of their time yet, so they can pay them nothing and keep human assets light.
Even still, there are few, but serious, unethical and deliberate imbalances and obscurities defining the status of employees and contractors around the responsibilities that hold up relationships between clients and the company. Plus, the indefensibly partial selection of who gets to be converted to a full-time employee and how fast. Playground-level two-facedness in a never-ending game of “Mother, May I?”.
-Haphazard and inexplicable project management decisions to add on new roles and responsibilities suddenly, but even more disappointing when clients are transferred around with little regard to an account’s demonstrated forward momentum with a team member, the relationships and skills they’ve built, and the traffic growth benchmarks they need for promotion. And if these moves aren’t random, or a sugar-coated punishment, what are they?
-Required independent training when you’re starting out will unavoidably add an uncompensated 5 to 10 hours to your 40-hour work week and can go for months on end. It’s not only a litmus test to see if you’ll work free overtime or else land in the doghouse, but it also becomes an excuse to never train somebody again after the first month when everything is crammed in.
It’s peers who have to do a lot of iron-sharpening-iron with each other through public tip-sharing, but that only goes as far as those who have the time and willingness to listen.
-Diversity hasn’t yet made its way into the leadership and supervisor rungs, and that’ll take many years given the process of being molded into the FXFamily’s nepotistic groupthink that the company can do no wrong.
