- Not recession-proof. Sales were absolutely awful for the duration of the 2020 pandemic. No assistance from the company whatsoever despite most of their AEs making less than a living wage, just more demands and virtual meetings to talk about how bad the company is down.
- This is full commission. When you sell more, you make more, right? Wrong. In my 4 years working for iHeart, I sold more year over year but made the same amount of money. This is because they constantly revise the compensation plans and shrink any chance of getting a bonus for meeting your budget. Budgets are set so unattainably high that it's very unlikely you'll meet it.
- Very little diversity. I watched several intelligent, competent women get passed over for promotions because the company would rather hire a man either internally or externally. Men vastly outweigh women in management roles at iHeart. Also, I worked in an office with 40 employees and they were all white. I understand that sometimes this is just a coincidence, but in an area with high black and other ethnic populations, I found the lack of diversity very odd-- as if it was done on purpose. Even throughout the company when I would attend conferences, other branches also had a severe lack of diversity and management was all men between ages 35-60.
- iHeart is now scrambling to be a leader in the digital space. Unfortunately instead of choosing a small assortment of high quality products and selling them with impeccable customer service, they are constantly acquiring new products to sell and launching them way before they're ready. You can't successfully specialize in 1000 things at once and it shows.
- I went through several rounds of layoffs at iHeart and while I survived, others who were loyal to the company for decades were not. I watched 30 year veterans get let go simply because they made "too much" (and by "too much" I mean like $50k). They fired all local HR and accounting people and instructed all inquiries to go to corporate. It would sometimes take weeks or months to get something done that could have been handled in 5 minutes with a local person.