- Summary: Content Guru is fundamentally broken, totally lacking in structures and organisation necessary to be the company it currently claims to be. The rhetoric and culture running through the company is toxic, and senior management are so disconnected that a group personality disorder seems almost feasible.
- Lies. As you're being recruited, you'll be told a number of lies (or at least, non-truths) about Content Guru. The first is that they like to develop you. The second is that they will train you. They will do neither. As far as I can tell this is pretty much true across the board, but I can say for sure from my own experience that this is emphatically true in Sales. If anything, you'll be the opposite of developed. You'll be encouraged to behave in an underhand manner, and I've regularly seen colleagues straight up lie to clients.
The training, however, is the major bugbear. Working in this industry requires a good deal of technical knowledge about telecoms. Which department you're in will affect how much, but aside from Finance and Admin, you'll need a very strong base level. That's fair enough in and of itself, but you're given no help reaching it. This is despite the inescapable fact that they need you to have it, in order to do your job properly.
Training consists of some fairly tedious (but obligatory, to be fair) security, health and safety sessions. There's also an induction presentation, meant to be given on your first day. I got five minutes into mine before being abandoned, and it was never completed. Hardly professional.
The only decent bit of training is the 'Basic Telephony' session, which briefly tells you a little about how the most basic aspects of the technology work. It's not nearly enough to help you sell anything with any confidence or integrity.
Because of this, 99% of your training will be self-medicated, or the result of harassing someone technical to spare some of their extremely limited time. Despite regularly telling senior management that I didn't have enough information to properly do my job, I was never given any help in attaining it.
You are told (and told to tell others, especially clients) that you're on a graduate scheme. You are not. Graduate schemes have a structure to them. The word 'scheme' implies that some thought has gone into the process undertaken, which cannot be the case here.
I realised on my second day at the company that the training wasn't going to be adequate. Foolishly, I chose to persevere.
- Culture. At first I felt I'd been hoodwinked into some elaborate wind-up, hosted by (and starring) corporate hell's own version of Ant and Dec. At Content Guru it is very quickly and very clearly made clear to you that passing your six month probation period is no mean feat, not least because you’re regularly witnessing colleagues either stressing over theirs, or ‘not passing’. You constantly fear for your job, and with good reason.
I use scare quotes above because ‘not passing’ implies that you’ve done something wrong, or in some way failed to attain some targets set to you. In my case, at least, neither of these things were the case.
I received no warnings that I was in danger of ‘not passing’ my probation, other than seeing colleagues dismissed with insufficient explanation. I was also set no targets, so had nothing to fall short of. I presume there was a vague ‘desired standard’, but apparently you call fall short of that, in two of my former colleagues’ cases, for offences like having a beard or an ‘accent’. Indeed, in my exit interview, I was told that I’d done nothing wrong, and that the person conducting the interview had every faith that I would have reached the desired level soon enough, provided more time. In fact, the exit interview was more of an apology than anything else, and I’d like to thank the manager concerned for being the only vaguely human person amongst my seniors during my time there.
Other aspects of the culture are just as bad. Once you get to the Content Guru level of the office building, go through the doors and turn right, you enter an almost farcical environment saturated in the worst consequences of working in a male-dominated environment. Prior to working at Content Guru, though I spotted a gender gulf (something my presence only exacerbated), I assumed the modern day working environment would have grown out of something I considered outdated. Not to be. Things like due praise, being basically decent to people and humility all seem to be considered weaknesses, with the equivalent opposite qualities all being gratuitously displayed on a regular and tedious basis. Basic politeness was in short supply, too. Asking the Project Management team for anything, no matter how obviously it falls under their remit, was like drawing blood from an exceptionally dull stone.
I’ve chosen not to go into detail on some of the comments/’jokes’ I’ve overheard from those at the very top of the tree, but suffice to say they are, at the very least, incredibly outdated and smack of a total lack of basic awareness.
Then there’s the hours. From what I’ve heard, the hours in Engineering are pretty savage. However, I can only comment with authority on the hours in Sales. You are, quite obviously, expected to go beyond your contracted 9-5.30 hours. Indeed, we were told (in January, I believe) that we were expected to be in for 8.30 going forward, in order to ‘set an example’. Going home before half six also seemed to be treated with disdain.
Confront senior management with that complaint and they’ll most likely respond with something along the lines of ‘this isn’t the case, no-one is penalised for going home on time’. I can’t verify the truth or falsity of that, given that I was dismissed with no feedback on what I’d done wrong, or hadn’t done right. What I can verify is that senior management are (or would be incredibly remiss not to be) acutely aware of this perception, and have done nothing to allay the worries of their employees. They simply remain silent and passive, and the fear culture perpetuates itself. If this is genuinely something those at the top wished to change, it’d be a three email, tops, to correct. The fact that that hasn’t, to my knowledge, happened, is tacit compliance with that perception. If you work here, do not expect to leave by six. Personally, I don’t know how those in the office with kids were able to justify it to themselves.
- Lack of care. You are hired by Content Guru off the back of a strong degree from a Russell Group university, and having gone through a very thorough interview process. You will be hired because you’ve been deemed intelligent enough to grasp the difficult tasks in front of you, and succeed in those tasks. What’s expected of you, however, is ridiculous. A colleague told me that during his pay review, he was told something along the lines of ‘you need to care about the company’. This notion is utterly absurd, given how the company treats the majority of its employees. You are not cared for, or valued as an employee, at all. And yet, you are expected to, as mentioned in another review, adhere to an almost cult-like mentality about the company, which you’re constantly told is brilliant.
During a Sales meeting, the MD voiced a complaint about this very website. He was frustrated that he was seen as being uncaring about those who worked for him, and explained to us that this wasn’t the case. At the time, I sympathised somewhat. It’s easy to be seen as the villain of the piece when you sit at the biggest desk.
I no longer hold that view, for a number of reasons. First, the manner in which new graduate starters are treated is nothing short of abhorrent, and recruiting should simply be halted until it can be rectified. Second, is the obvious cowardice displayed whenever someone is let go. I consider it to be no coincidence that all three sackings I witnessed, including my own, took place whilst both possible decision makers were out of the office. As such, I received no meaningful explanation for my sudden unemployment.
I was let go after four months, with no training in a highly technical industry, in my first job outside of university. Whoever decided that was ample evidence that I wasn’t sufficient didn’t have the confidence in their reasons to explain why their decision to hire me in the first place was now erroneous. If you are considering employment with, or a job offer from Content Guru – I mention this as these are the people you will be working for, and these are the standards they hold themselves to.
In fact, the standards are a little lower. I was fired a week after learning of a sudden, close death, on the morning I returned from the funeral.
I would advise the MD to reconsider his understanding of the word ‘care’.
