* I acknowledge for some these might be cons but others won't have any issues and that's okay. But these are my personal cons
This company hires full-time international employees as independent contractors providing no standard benefits or tax deductions. This allows them to save money and fire people whenever they please as these employees are not technically protected under labour laws. However, hiring people and making them work as regular full-time employees while treating them like independent contractors is employee misclassification which is illegal in North America and can result in multiple fines and penalties when reported. Proceed with this in mind.
From my experience, their hiring process involved 5 interview stages and a 6-page long assignment basically asking the candidate to lay out an entire detailed marketing plan for the company. At the time I thought this was worth it. At the end of this gruelling process, they gave a lowball offer (way below the salary range advertised which initially reels in candidates). In my case, the salary range was CAD 65K-$85K but after all 5 rounds, I was offered CAD $45K since I didn't have enough commercial experience. I wish I was told this during the earlier stages. I didn't negotiate and was open to being hired as a junior because I thought that meant more training, mentorship and learning and development. But you'll basically do the same workload as everyone else. From what I’ve heard a lot of people get lowballed here even with sufficient experience so rmbr to negotiate. I highly recommend reading the full 80+ page employee handbook before signing on no matter how pushy they can be to get you to sign on quickly. Take a day or two to decide but I understand if this job was your only option. I witnessed a male US hire quit on the second day of onboarding and a female US hire quit after six months and the stories she’s shared are horrific. Negative experiences shared by current and previous employees continue to scare away new hires. At first, I thought they were disgruntled employees but after working there for a while I understood and believed them. But take everything with a grain of salt as always.
At the time there were only two people on the North American marketing team, myself and one other girl. We were given very little to no onboarding training and expected to carry out all the marketing deliverables across the board from digital ads, social media, out-of-home, event planning etc. This is expected for start-up culture which I fully acknowledge but we were also told to plan a North American tour in one month spanning 6 cities with two 500 people events per city. You'll probably end up working overtime without pay, running events during weekends and working late nights on your laptops. Depends on how many people are on the teams at the time. If you're up for it then great.
I was told that the company goal was to get fobs (this is a slur referring to immigrants and the exact word they used) off the app and get more liberal Muslims on the app. Constantly being asked to make my ad copy “spicier,” even though this type of messaging would receive a lot of backlash and didn’t resonate with their target audience. I felt like I was being asked to put out tone-deaf marketing material to increase virality but at what cost? Maybe you'll love this if you're into guerilla marketing but I highly value building a strong brand perception.
Anyway, I finally decided to quit because to me the experience wasn’t worth the low salary, lack of job security and benefits, and poor company culture and management. I ultimately decided that it wasn’t going to benefit my career growth/goals. When I quit, I was told that they would make deductions from my wages to cover the expenses of an employee social trip that I was no longer attending since I quit (apparently this was a policy in the employee handbook but it’s still considered wage theft) I thought it would be slimey to go on the trip and wait for the monthly salary to come in before quitting. They didn’t pay me for 2 weeks worth of wages and 1 day of overtime. I was sent an email listing out items and costs such as hotels, resorts, and airplane tickets. They never provided any official invoices so that I could cross reference the refund policies and they could’ve also (probably did) had one of the new hires take my place on the trip. I asked them for invoices twice and finally after weeks I emailed them letting them know I would report them for wage theft and employee misclassification and they paid back half the wages they owed. The other half, they couldn't get refunded and sent me the invoices. oh well, it is what it is. Also just remember that stock options are a fantasy unless the company goes public…and you will lose them if you quit but its okay since they are fantasy stocks anyway.