Just Don't Do It - PR Professional Startr Co. Employee Review

Thank you for your feedback. I am happy to hear that you had a positive experience with the Startr Co. team and felt like you were rightly compensated. We are very intentional about ensuring this as we continue to grow. I am disappointed that you felt surprised by your role once joining our team. When bringing on new team members, we provide detailed and accurate job descriptions and also go over the makeup of account teams to ensure that candidates understand their role within our organization. Each candidate also has the opportunity to speak to multiple Startr Co. team members during the interview process and while onboarding their first week. Nonetheless, your experience remains valid, and we will use your feedback to make our communication around roles and responsibilities even clearer moving forward. It is true that as a new supervisor (or in almost any role), work is initially reviewed by management to ensure that our new team members are supported and get the feedback they need to feel confident in our ways of working. Knowing that every agency is different, we want our team to feel secure in our processes and methods. This kind of oversight usually tapers off within the first 2 weeks – month of work, and we probably could have done a better job communicating our thought process and timeline. Again, this is a learning we will use to be better moving forward. I am a bit confused about the mass pitching comment as this is actually against our beliefs as an agency. We do ask that our teams pitch a wide variety of contacts, but to do so we utilize a variety of pitch angles and insist upon personalization and curation for each. This method has been highly successful for us and is one of the main reasons we produce such high quality earned media coverage for clients. If your experience was anything other than this, I feel we must have done an extremely poor job of communicating expectations. For this I apologize. In regard to staffing, our teams are generally staffed with 3 people per client team. Our teams then collaborate on pitches across clients to work smarter, not harder. Working with startups and emerging brands, we have found that this team size is perfect for the kind/amount of work we are being hired to produce and we set deliverables and KPIs accordingly. We are constantly working to minimize administrative work so that teams can spend time on those areas where we yield the most value. It is an ongoing process and one we can always improve on. I am sorry that your experience with Startr Co. was not what you had hoped for. We are very proud of our small but mighty agency and team, while also respecting that it may not be the place for everyone. Thank you again for providing a thoughtful review that we can use to provide a better employee experience. We wish you the best of luck of your next venture. Monica Guzman Escobar, Startr Co. CEO