Good for Entry-level SEOs and Content Professionals. Emphasis on "Entry Level" - Lead Copy Strategist CT Employee Review

2.0
9 Mar 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You'll get in-depth expertise across a range of industries and verticals from real estate to B2B tech, luxury eCommerce, aftermarket automotive parts, etc. One aspect of the negative reviews I'd push back on is the lack of camaraderie and company culture. Working remote on a full-time basis actually gave me a pretty good frame of mind for the ongoing pandemic lockdowns, especially as someone who works in branding and content marketing. You'll learn the value of communicating effectively and efficiently. Plus, you'll get to work with talented and driven professionals from across the world. Not many companies can offer that. CT is a great training ground if you want to get a crash course in SEO, content management, content strategy, and honestly, leadership. Coalition Technologies gave me my first management position. Despite my overall negative perspective on this company, it is still an organization that gave me a chance to prove myself and strengthen my sense of self worth.

Cons

There's little to no work-life balance despite the lofty rhetoric piped into your inbox and gchats on a weekly basis. As a team lead, I also had to make peace with getting gchats after hours and on weekends. Be prepared to do a lot of work for a salary that is objectively not commensurate to industry standards. (For reference, I don't even hold a management position at my current agency and I earn triple what I made as a team lead with CT.) I should hope that talent acquisition has improved since I was with CT. Contrary to literally any other agency I've worked for, CT had a nasty habit of hiring entry-level employees without getting approval from department heads they'd be working under. You can imagine the type of churn that would create when unqualified new hires were suddenly thrust into roles they had to learn on the fly. As team lead, it was incumbent on me to not only manage 6 full-time employees and content strategy for over 20 clients, I also had to mentor new hires with little to no content and SEO experience. In a way, this actually taught me a lot about how to improve onboarding procedures within agencies I've worked for after CT. If you've taken a cursory glance at the neutral and negative reviews, you'll notice the defensive tone that senior leadership immediately takes in response to critical feedback. You should see this as a bright, fire engine red flag if a CEO speaks frequently about having an open-door policy on feedback yet can't fathom why people would deign to actually follow up on that.

avatar
CT Response
5y
Thank you for the honest feedback! I can see how my responses here may seem defensive, and perhaps they are. I am often responding to a one sided perspective (sometimes a valid characterization and in other reviews not) with a differing view point. I love the people I work with, the work that we do, and have a lot of confidence in our agency both as a place to work and as a professional services provider. Given the statements about your role here, I'm guessing you worked with us quite early as an agency (in excess of 6 years ago at least), and a lot has changed since then (and some things have remained consistent). Coalition does aim to foster opportunities to strengthen one's sense of self worth and prove what they're capable of. That's part of the reason we are willing to hire green candidates with skills but a lack of experience (like yourself when you first joined us), and work on developing the experience necessary to be a bigger contributor (like yourself when you left us). In our early days, we ran more fire drills than we needed because we were learning as we went and growing rapidly. I don't think we made the best decisions all the time there, but we did learn. We are much more mindful of work-life balance, improved our training practices and resources, developed our hiring approaches, and found plenty of additional cash and wage incentives for team members (now including profit share, bonus days of pay, incentive pay, performance based pay programs, and more). Our agency is built on the effort to get better, in every arena. Whether its in what we do for our clients, or what we do for our teammates, or what we do for our industry at large, we want to find new ways to improve. I believe we continue to do that.

Explore other reviews about CT

5.0
29 Jan 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Give good training and supportive work environment

Cons

Pay could be better for this role.

3.0
21 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good pay - Team is great - Excellent organization

Cons

- Time tracking software is very invasive (screenshots every 5 to 10 min, mouse and keyboard tracking, camera must always be on while on work hours) - KPIs can be too demanding - Workload can be too heavy (I was managing around 15 accounts at one point)

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