Yext Reviews

- We've struggled to maintain the culture that made this an appealing place to work 3-4 years ago. Some of this is to be expected as we scale and lose some of that start-up charm, however, I think a lot of this tied to how we hire. It seems as if the last few years hiring managers have not taken team chemistry into account when hiring especially at the managerial level and it's led to some huge misses. - Speaking of hiring, let's talk about diversity! Did you go to Princeton, Cornell, UVA, or Duke? Did you previously work at Salesforce or do consulting at Deloitte? Is your idea of small-talk discussing your vacation homes, luxury cars, and boats? Are you a middle-aged white dude from a waspy background with a total lack of self-awareness? Great! No need to apply, the job is yours! Seriously I would say a good chunk of Yexters (especially senior leadership and sales) fit at LEAST one of those criteria, if not most. - While we're on diversity; or lack thereof, if you're a POC, think carefully and ask the right questions before choosing to work here. If you’re Black and insist on working here do yourself a favor and have a timeline and exit strategy in mind. Despite the extraordinary performances put on by our CEO and CHRO this past June in response to the recent uprisings and civil unrest; to quote Kanye West: YEXT DOES NOT CARE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE! Like so many other companies this was all talk and virtue signaling. Six months later nothing substantive has been done. We still haven't hired someone for the Diversity and Inclusion role, which allegedly is because we're taking time to find the right person...sure okay. About a year and a half ago our CRO decided he wanted to hire a former colleague as an EVP after running into each other at an event. Just to make room for him several teams worked together to restructure our revenue teams, reset targets, and a ton of other operational labor. We did all this to accommodate this man in less than a month. It's been almost seven since initially having these conversations. When leadership wants something done they don't drag their feet, Diversity and Inclusion is clearly not a priority for them. - Back on track! Yext's philosophy for their Black employees seems to be to hire them in junior positions, help them develop, and promote them upward. It's been alluded to that this is because finding qualified black candidates for senior roles in the tech space is difficult. I'm not going to get into how lazy that mindset is, or the fact that hiring the same profile for all your management roles ensures you'll just continue hiring more of the same, but okay, developing talent internally seems like a sound philosophy! Except that's not how it works in practice. On top of there being a general lack of diversity, people of color; but especially black folk, are generally promoted with less frequency than their white counterparts. Just as an example in a global company of ~1400 employees there is ONE black people manager. We're not talking exec level, not even VP or Director level, but just first-line managers. There are already so few black people at Yext, but the lack of upward mobility makes it even less likely to find a black person with over 2-3 years of tenure. Most eventually realize they can't grow here and end up searching for greener pastures. - While inequity is most apparent for POC, don't worry as long as you're not on the Sales or Engineering teams you can probably hop on the undervalued bandwagon as well! This company LOVES to dump money into Sales; which to be fair makes complete sense, they generate revenue. However, our Sales org has continued to scale, but we haven't really scaled all the other teams that support their efforts. Operations, Strategy, Enablement, Support, HR Business Partners, these teams have stayed roughly the same over the years and in some cases even downsized. So if you are in a position that works adjacent to our Sales org you're usually going to be overworked and probably not compensated for your extra effort. Any budget that may have been used for a raise or promotion is likely being funneled to the Sales org. - Speaking of Sales there's definitely some dead weight in that org, particularly in the higher rungs and more ill-defined "sales'' teams (e.g. Strategic Alliances). Everyone can see it, but unfortunately, they're usually a referral from someone in senior leadership. So fortunately for them, but unfortunately for their direct reports and everyone who has the misfortune of working with them, they get to squeeze this meal ticket for all it's worth. That's not to say we don't have excellent sellers who are great at their jobs. Just that there's a decent amount of unproductive people, who aren't necessarily a great fit skills-wise, just eating up resources that could be going elsewhere. - Yext’s refusal to scale and invest in anything that isn’t Sales or Engineering also means most other orgs get shafted when it comes to career advancement. At other places, you might expect as the company grows, different arms of the company scale to meet their demands, which leads to opportunities for promotions popping up organically. However, this is not the case at Yext, most promotions happen as a result of someone leaving. This is not to say these promotions aren’t deserved, in fact in most cases they’re long overdue, but the thing is a lot of people don’t want to play the waiting game with their careers. So usually after being stagnant or being passed by once or twice; whether it be the position going to a colleague or more commonly being backfilled by an external candidate, folks end up leaving. I remember earlier in my tenure during our weekly townhall an Exec was running through our plans of scaling and explained to make this happen he would need every single one of us in the room to eventually take on roles as Directors and VPs. At the time I lapped up all the Kool-Aid, but my time at Yext these last few years has made me less naive and more skeptical of grandiose Exec speak. -Finally, let's talk execs. I actually think our Exec team is a pretty bright bunch. However, that doesn't mean they always make the brightest decisions. I feel like we are constantly pivoting to something new or changing our strategy. Change isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it seems like Execs just want their direct reports to be "yes-men", rather than consulting them on the viability and potential ramification of changes. Instead, they decide they want to do something, and we worker bees are expected to do it ASAP. On a bit of a tangent, the vast majority of the exec team often lacks self-awareness. In a recent meeting to discuss, our low employee satisfaction survey results; of which Yext foregoing raises this year was one of the biggest pain points, some Execs decided to make small talk; the topic being about boats none of us could ever hope to afford. Faux pas like this are not an uncommon occurrence, it's actually almost routine for a leader to say something thoughtless during an All-hands or company-wide town hall.