6 Apr 2021
Vanhack Response
4yHi there, this is Ilya, CEO at VanHack. I wanted to personally reply to this message since a lot of it was directed towards myself and ultimately I am responsible for the employee experience at VanHack.
I am very confident that I know who wrote this review. It’s a person who left VanHack and tried to start a competitor, which didn’t work out. I believe they’re writing this post to try to hurt the company.
There are many things to say in response to this post, so let’s go through them point by point:
The reviews are not fake. Yes, I did ask our team to leave honest reviews on Glassdoor as a birthday present for me in 2018. Other than that, we haven’t actively asked for people to leave reviews.
If I’m the worst CEO people have worked with, why have many of our team members stayed at VanHack for 4-5 years, basically since the start of the company? Ask anyone who is on our team right now what they think of me as a leader.
We do move fast at VanHack so many new things come up. This is how startups work. People who do not like change and must always follow the process 100% should not work here. As for “loving to firing in weeks” again this isn’t true, we always put people on Improvement plans and give them time to change.
Not having A players on the team is just insulting to many of the great people who put their hard work into making VanHack the success that it is. Yes it’s true we don’t offer silicon valley salaries so we don’t have people here who went to Ivy League schools and worked at Google, but we do have many great people who have grown and improved a ton over the years. I’m very proud of our team. (Also, I don’t think saying other people aren’t A players is a very A player thing to do…)
As for “just being in it for the money and not caring about our candidates” again this is 100% false. If I wanted to create a company that was just about making money I would have gone into Cryptocurrency or something like that. I believe he is talking about a case where one of our candidates at a Montreal company complained about her employer. We did speak with the employer to understand what happened and as always there were 2 sides to the story. We spoke to other candidates at that company who said good things about the company, so we kept working with them. There is another case of another company in Montreal that we did stop working with since we believed it wasn’t a great place to work. Same with a startup from Toronto. It is something we are very aware of and right now frankly we have more customers than we can keep up with so we are being more picky with the ones we work with.
Really bad pay. Yes, we do pay lower than Canadian rate for some of our roles. However, that's because these roles are located in other countries where our salaries are actually very high. In other roles, such as Sales where we have people in Canada and Europe, we have had people make over $20,000 a month with base and commission. I’d say this is a great salary. Again, we’re a startup and performance gets rewarded.
High turnover. Yes, we did lay people off during COVID in April 2020 as our business was in danger of running out of money, but very few people actually quit voluntarily.
Feedback not being heard. Sure, I can do a better job of listening and taking feedback, especially negative. This is definitely one of my weaknesses. However we now have a really great leadership team and HR in place who compliment my weaknesses and work closely with their teams to improve our processes and listen to the team. I can point to many things that we’ve improved over the last year such as changing our All Hands meeting format, changing the sales team’s commission structure, introducing Unlimited Personal time off, introducing a $500 a year Learning and Development budget and implementing a mentorship program for the women on our team.
No room for growth. We have promoted and sponsored the visa and relocation of 5 of our team members, so this is clearly false. For example, we just promoted one of our top recruiters to be the new Head of Talent on our team. We also promoted another recruiter to be the head of a new Screening team we’re building and we promoted one of our developers to be the head of the Frontend team. But the fact is that we’re a startup with just 40 people with not as many leadership roles as a large company would. This is something we hope to change as a company and one of the benefits of working at a startup is that even if you’re not a “manager” you’ll have a ton of responsibilities and challenges to take on.
To finish, I was really hurt when I read this post as the person clearly was very upset with me and his experience at VanHack. This obviously isn’t something that we want to happen.
However I am really confident in our team, our company and most importantly the incredible VanHack community.
If you would like to discuss any of the points above feel free to email me at ilya@vanhack.com, tweet me @ilyabrotzky or add me on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading and I hope you consider VanHack as a place to grow your career and make a huge difference in the lives of tech professionals globally.
