Against my better judgment, I gave Hopper the benefit of the doubt and applied for its customer service department role.
I researched Hopper and found many negative reviews from former employees, current employees, and customers. Hopper received a huge amount of funding ($70 million) right after the pandemic started (mainly from the Canadian government). Rather than hiring a larger customer service team to deal with the pandemic-induced volume, Hopper laid off many Canadian customer service employees and replaced them with cheaper labour abroad. Rather than adding more customer service phone lines, Hopper removed its only phone line after receiving an unprecedented volume of calls, making it even more challenging and frustrating for customers to get refunds for their refundable cancelled flights. Hopper put a plan in place towards the end of the year to deal with its customer service failures, but so much damage has been done. To this day, customers are still waiting for their money, and many are taking legal action.
I’m a Canadian citizen currently on extended travel and freelancing. Although the company claims to hire people globally for this fully remote position, I experienced location discrimination due to currently being in Africa. One of my emails was intended to ask the hiring manager if it was alright that I was in Africa so as not to waste anyone’s time. She completely ignored that email and ended up having to apologize during the interview for not reading it, because shipping equipment to me would apparently be an issue (even though they’re hiring people as far away as the Philippines). She proceeded to ask me irrelevant questions such as when was the last time I was in Canada, trying to determine the authenticity of my citizenship/residency, etc. I told her I could easily arrange to have the equipment shipped from Canada to Africa, and she said she had to find out if that would be acceptable. I never received a response from her and honestly wasn’t expecting one after she’d already ignored 3 of my emails during the interview process. I sent a total of 4 very friendly and polite emails (including a thank you after the interview) that were ignored entirely.
Hopper claims that customer service and empathy are at its core, yet these values are truly lacking in its culture. The CEO himself admitted, “We failed our customers.” Unfortunately, their hiring team is quite unprofessional. They need to rebuild from the group up. A lot has to be done for this company to recover its reputation.