Blackhawk Network reviews

3.3

56% would recommend to a friend

(953 total reviews)
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Talbott Roche

72% approve of CEO

48% positive business outlook

Blackhawk Network has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 953 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Blackhawk Network employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Financial Services industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

953 reviews
2.0
Jul 23, 2025

I hate working here

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- BHN is embracing AI which is cool to see. Devs have CoPilot and they're looking into licenses for more advanced AI dev tools. Nice! - Generous time off. If a holiday falls on a Thursday they'll usually give you Friday off "for free" as an employee appreciation day. Their PTO is "unlimited" BUT they seem to frown upon using more than 3 weeks a year (I'm definitely going over so we'll see what happens). - Work life balance is pretty good, I've never worked more than 40 hours a week. If you're at the beginning or near the end of your career and want a stable-ish job with decent pay and don't care about using the latest and greatest tech, BHN is a solid option.

Cons

- I was part of a startup that was acquired by BHN and since they introduced their engineers and processes our system has never been more unstable. We have weekly incidents caused by lack of communication across teams and people just not knowing what they're doing. - The pay is not competitive at all. My startup salary was more than the max range of the job level above me. I was also promoted and received no pay increase (probably due to the previous point). - HR has been a nightmare. Nobody I've talked to knows what they're doing and they are so condescending. Documents have misspellings, inaccurate info, and even my offer letter wasn't correct. It's a miracle my paycheck shows up at all. To verify I9 docs they want you to EMAIL them your sensitive docs which is so insecure and stupid that I thought the email was a phishing attempt. Our startup raised massive concerns over this and they were completely ignored. I don't trust HR to handle my sensitive docs correctly at all. They also repeatedly said things like "If you don't like it, you're free to work somewhere else" and "We didn't have to do this for you guys" which rubbed everyone the wrong way. I can't see myself contacting HR for anything ever because I don't want to deal with them and they talk to everyone like a child. - The culture is BAD and refuses to change. Everybody at the top just claps themselves on the back and ignores the needs of all the peons below them. Our quarterly meetings are mostly pre-recorded nonsense and I don't even bother showing up anymore as none of it means anything. One of our goals for the year is "Innovate"? Wow good job guys. - As a dev, you don't get control of your own machine. They install so much junk on it, it barely works. You have to do MFA 2-4 times in a row when booting up to login, connect to the VPN, etc. - All the tools they use are clunky. BitBucket in 2025? Really? Sharepoint? TEAMS?? This clearly isn't a tech company as they don't care about efficiency. Every change they've made has made me slower at my job and my day-to-day work is so frustratingly slow compared to what it used to be. - No transparency whatsoever. You don't get access to any repos without need to know. Everything is super siloed. Devs will post massive thousand-line MRs in our channel for approval and you won't know who they are, what they're doing in your project's code, or anything that's happening. - Most of their dev workforce is outsourced to other countries which is fine but it's hard to coordinate when there's a 12-hour difference in time zones. Our QA team is 12 hours ahead and are usually sleeping when our changes are going out the door. - I'm not hourly but BHN shuts down between Xmas and New Years and hourly employees either have to take no pay for that week or use a week of their own PTO which is absolutely ridiculous. I'm waiting until my shares vest and then I'm getting out of here. Every day is miserable and somehow keeps getting worse. If you want to climb the corporate ladder and make waves with the latest and greatest tech, do so elsewhere.

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Blackhawk Network Response
10mo
Thank you for the feedback! If you would ever like to further discuss your experience please reach out to us at humanresources@bhn.com.
2.0
Mar 24, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. 10 consecutive days off for the whole company during the last week of each year. No meetings, no calls, no Emails. 2. Hawk Appreciation Day. Every quarter there is at least one-day company-wide off for everyone to recharge.

Cons

I am only speaking for my own experience working in the finance department since I didn’t work for other teams. All comments are personal and subjective opinions. 1. Bad management. Spent a lot of time reading all reviews about BHN and found out most of the negative reviews were about the management especially for the mid-level management. This is TRUE. Since they are all relatively new (1 to 2 years range), they only have a birds-eye view of the whole business. They don’t know and (seems like) they don’t want to know the micro logic behind the business model. As a result, unreasonable timeline was created, unfriendly Email was distributed, unrealistic budget cut was plugged into plan and forecast, unremitting hard work was expected. 2. Lack of communication. They only come to me when they want something from me. Other than that, no communication regarding anything. No holiday greetings, no happy birthday messages, no Flyer points appreciating your hard work, no Email about the company’s strategies, no words on how the business would focus and where the business would go in the future, no insights on how I can improve myself and how we can work as a team effectively, no team meetings to talk about any concerns from the employees. One example: there was time I found out the numbers in the system were different from what I loaded when we did forecast. After reaching out to the system team and found out it was an adjustment request from the higher management. And nobody ever told me and my business partners. Sorry, this is not how I learned Finance in college and this is not how Finance works in the real world. You cannot just snap your fingers and make other people’s forecast numbers disappeared like Thanos. 3. Data Inconsistency. Accounting, Finance and the business all use different tools to pull data. And they never aligned with each other. When doing analysis, nobody knows which one should be used and which one is the accurate one. 4. Understaffed. During the past years, we lost almost all veterans who were the only ones knowing their areas. And their positions were never backfilled. Instead, all these extra works fell to the existing analysts and they already had tons of work to do. Then those existing analysts left as well. Vicious circle. 5. Overcomplicated business model. You have so many layers, segments, limitations, exceptions, outliers in your business model. When you are the main player in the industry, you should not make your business like rocket science. Otherwise, when a new competitor that can simplify everything in the process, you will be ruined.

1.0
Nov 15, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There is constant change as they are always acquiring new companies.

Cons

You are a number. Management/ Leadership is not concerned with culture or moral. The HR team is unhelpful and turns a blind eye. Overall, not a great employer. I worked for a great company that was acquired by BHNetwork, as much as I loved the day to day work I was doing, the culture and lack of care drove me to another company.

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