Rakuten Marketing UK is a disorganised and demotivating place to work
Pros
Free lunch Fridays Free breakfast Mondays Excellent office location 2 mins from tube station Near leather lane market Near excellent food outlets Good dental and medical benefits package
Cons
Where do I start? It's very clear with the 'glowing' reviews below that I don't need to add mine. But, I feel that I must warn people, because I don't want anyone else to suffer the hell that I went through. I can't even express in words how disorganised and demotivating Rakuten Marketing UK is. Nothing at this company made sense and by no exaggeration, the majority of employees are depressed, hence the extremely high turnover. In 2014, 8 Account Managers left the company (in a company of approx 60 people). I'll go through some of reasons why: 1. An Account Manager will be introduced to their role, without any professional training. When something goes wrong, the Account Manager will be blamed when management never told them the correct procedure in the first place. The director will give you 8-11 clients to manage but will not give you a tutorial on how to use the dashboard, how to read a trend card, what to put in the agenda, what to communicate with your client, how to create a feed, how to check the feed, what tasks to give the Coordinators (who are also swamped) and how to create an account review. There is no structure. You learn from your peers, unfortunately your peers are so overworked with calls, emails, meetings that they do not have the time help others. I love helping people, but when you can't even breathe, you can't help others. 2. The management aren't trained to manage people. I never felt that any of the managers made you feel empowered and in control of your own work. I felt like I wasn't trusted and I was always micro-managed even though I worked as hard as I could when being overworked. A poor director will give poor advice to their managers and then will give poor advice to employees. 3. The Account Manager has to attend so many meetings, all day, they do not have time to check their emails to answer their client, and then the client complains. Sure, you could get another Account Manager to cover you, but guess what? There are not enough Account Managers to cover all of the accounts. Let me go through how many meetings a week: all company meeting, UK team meeting, client services meeting, publisher spotlight x 2-3, day in the life of a publisher, account reviews (8-11 dependent on how many clients you have), catch ups, events, random pointless client meetings when the senior manager wants to show that they are doing some work for a promotion. We wanted to help our clients, but we didn't physically (and eventually emotionally) have the capacity to support them. 4. The managing director, he's a very nice guy personally. Unfortunately, he's more of Ted Talks motivational speaker than a manager. He will talk about 'amazing things and endless possibilities', but none of these will be actioned in reality. He's all about the budget for the short term, not the long term. 5. Lack of professionalism and procedures, there's no real complaints procedure, there's no pension scheme, no maternity benefits package. This company is all about the term 'budget'. And don't get me started on the unfair compensation and the career progression for promotions/salaries. Save yourself. Do not work here.