A complete crash in culture and work-life balance.
When I began at iCIMS, I was ecstatic. A "NJ best place to work" that valued its employees in a beautiful workplace setting. I walked in the door with every intention of making iCIMS my career. I was greeted by an incredible onboarding and training team and continued my love story; I left one of those required sparkly reviews at the 90-day mark like all those you see here.
Not long after onboarding, however, we found out that our CEO and Founder would be leaving. In his stead was a new energetic CEO, who had previously run and sold another SaaS company for our parent investor, Vista.
The new CEO started in February 2020, Covid came March 2020, and everything fell apart from there. Nearly the entire C-level suite left shortly after his arrival, and were quickly replaced by his friends, many from SAP.
A large "reduction in force" or "layoff" came in April 2020. Covid was blamed, but it's become clear this would have happened anyway and instead the pandemic was a convenient excuse. The cuts were too deep, made in order to make the company look more profitable in an attempt to sell us; unfortunately, no one ever bought.
The remaining staff quickly encountered a clientele that were needier than ever -- receiving more applications from applicants than ever before due to high unemployment, and needing changes to their existing protocols and procedures on a short timeline. Services/Support especially found themselves bearing the brunt: Sales began overpromising the software to close desperately needed deals, only for clients to hit implementation and find out we weren't what was promised. Implementation provided minimal training to clients (through no fault of their own as they too were overwhelmed with too many clients and not enough time or staff), releasing major clients into a "live" environment with minimal to no understanding of the system. New leaders in Support came from a whole different culture of call centers and seemed to give little regard to our already crashing work-life balance.
First came the offer of a "pizza party" to work 5 extra hours on Saturday -- $25 whole dollars on Doordash! When virtually no one accepted, 5 mandatory unpaid hours of overtime were instituted per week for every TSE instead. Eventually, that was rolled back, replaced instead by the forced assignment of more cases than could be handled during work hours, forcing you to either stay late or drown. Huge extra case dumps were assigned to you before you were allowed to take holidays. The time allowed off the phones to focus on those force assigned cases and your existing workload had already been "temporarily" rolled back from 2 hours a day, to 1.5 hours, eventually to 1 hour a day. You were expected to be on the phone the other 7 hours actively taking new cases via phone.
Wait times for client calls began to creep up. Higher level/tenured resources across the company began to leave, seeing the writing on the wall. The CEO began giving the entire company extra "recharge" PTO days to "avoid burnout" which helped many departments, but no one in Support were allowed to take the extra days. (We were paid extra, but this does little to cure burnout.)
Wait times reached sometimes up to 5-6 hours for clients to reach someone via phone. There was always someone on hold.
Clients were waiting up to 4 weeks for a first response to email cases, prioritized by how much they pay. The mantra was if it was urgent, they would call in, so these weren't a priority.
iForm work was outsourced to a team in India, rather than hire or train here, and leadership talked about how eventually they would start taking basic cases and calls as well.
TSEs found themselves either excessively micromanaged (to the point of asking about the length of bathroom breaks) or in some cases forgotten about with no communication at all. Team meetings were canceled repeatedly due to volume, leaving everyone feeling like they were just floating alone out at sea. Tenured managers began to quit.
No training was provided before each release, leaving support to react to client issues in real time with new products and changes they had never experienced before. No learning, no growth. When complained about, the response was to create a mandatory 5-hour training session on a Sunday in June, in addition to your existing work schedule.
If you took time off using your generous 'unlimited pto', the work just piled up. If you took a week off, no one monitored the cases, and clients waited over a week for a reply. Upon return, you waded through the 9-11 new email cases force assigned per day on return, the clients who needed replies for the entire week, plus 7 hours of phone volume a day. Some colleagues would take a PTO day then work anyway just to catch up.
Almost the entire tenured TSE staff left for new higher-paying jobs with less stress, causing a monumental knowledge drain. This wasn't just the case in Support -- Integrations lost 60-70% of their tenured staff from what I heard. AMs, TAMs, and CSMs leaving weekly. Big clients had no idea who their point of contact even was anymore.
We tried to speak up, tried to say what was happening, and nothing changed. Now it's too late. The iCIMS that once was is no longer.
