Deel reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(1,972 total reviews)
avatar

Alex Bouaziz

92% approve of CEO

84% positive business outlook

Deel has an employee rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, based on 1,972 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Deel employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
1.0
Aug 9, 2022

A miserable work environment

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The only main pro is that the job is extremely remote friendly. Like other detailed reviews have shared, the cons truly outweigh the pros.

Cons

- Yes, it’s remote-friendly but there is no thoughtfulness into building a positive, remote environment. No WFH stipend and no boundaries as to people’s working hours. You’re expected to be online all the time and to answer requests right away. Don’t answer? You’ll get shouted down for being slow. - No proper salary methodology. They localize salaries which means folks outside of the US and UK don’t get paid competitively at all. For a company that preaches about global hiring, you’d think they’d be a bit more forward thinking about this aspect. - Management is terrible. I’ve seen this from the top down. Leadership from the exec team is immature and disrespectful. Some middle managers echo that and talk down to their team. If you try to go to HR, nothing gets taken seriously because no one wants to take accountability. It’s all ego here. No one wants to admit when they’re wrong. No one wants to listen to feedback. (There are a few eggs but 90% is spoiled rotten). I’ve seen multiple instances where leaders have made a mistake but want to find a victim to blame. Oh, and this usually happens in public channels too. Be prepared to get yelled at on Slack or sometimes even during a video call. - Looking to grow in your career? Nope. I’ve never received an answer about how to get a promotion or what’s next in my role. - Processes are a total mess and they don’t invest in proper tools for the team. There’s no thoughtful strategy in managing knowledge and processes. You’re expected to always know what’s in Notion (which is an utter mess). Everyone’s getting information from different places or doesn’t know where the information lives so then people just end up asking the same questions in channels for support, success and product teams to answer everyday. This is not sustainable. - A lot of the positive reviews come from the sales team. As much as the sales team may have some kinks in their processes, the real mess is everything post-sales. Managing a client here can be extremely challenging because the product is not easy to understand and questions related to legal or compliance have to be funnelled through internal experts who are working at capacity. - Cross departmental communication is atrocious. The product team ships updates without properly informing and educating the team or even customers frankly. Many times things that are on the roadmap get randomly dropped and then random releases pop up, all without proper notice.

1.0
Jul 7, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you are a sadist you will love it

Cons

Pretty obvious they have a lack of experienced leadership for a company of this size. The director seems to have watched Wolf of Wall Street a few too many times, and is insistent on using veiled threats, constant intimidation and pressure as motivating strategies for the team. Massive lack of respect for the SDR team, with ludicrously high targets that even leadership admits they are difficult to hit. Despite this, they still encourage working overtime, making 100s of calls a day, and questioning your self worth in order to hit these numbers. Micro management is the culture here. They insist on tracking everyone's targets on a day by day, hour by hour basis. The director using threats of "spot checks" to ensuring reps are dialing every second possible. Many people quitting weeks after starting. Perhaps it's due to toxic culture? Seriously, if you are interviewing here, please ask about employee turnover rate. To top that off, they hired Canadians as full time employees with no healthcare benefits to offer. Honestly kind of embarrassing to work for a company that can't even provide the same level of benefits as McDonalds. Culture doesn't seem particularly important. They constantly cite "Deel speed", but you'll quickly realize this is just a way to veil toxic expectations and work life balance for their employees.

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Deel Response
3y
I appreciate the directness and candor of your review, although I am sorry to hear that your experience at Deel has not been a fit. I do agree with your advice to management - be careful not to prioritize growth at all costs. Deel hit product to market fit and took off in terms of customer count and internal headcount starting around July last year (July 2021) so we have been building the rocket ship while flying, which is typical in a hyper growth startup, over the past 12 months. We have been in our infancy. So I, like you, look at where we are and understand that we must build the foundations as in any start up at our stage (not size). Our size, in terms of customer count and headcount, exacerbates our situation of being in start up phase with our organizational structure, leadership development, technology and automation, processes, etc. I disagree with your perspective that culture is not important. Culture is incredibly important and we have been establishing the foundations to deliver the culture we strive for - speed, customer obsession, solving tough problems, fiscally conservative, globally representative and inclusive, resilient, growth mindset. We do understand that Deel won'e be a culture fit for every person. People who are not comfortable or able to be successful working in a fully remote environment, delivering while working autonomously, working cross functionally in a matrix and across time zones, and generally being driven to solve tough problems at speed with our customer in mind will not enjoy or be a fit working at Deel. Regarding the SDR team specifically, we've had turnover in our senior leadership and are actively searching for a Head of SDRs (VP level) who has experience building, scaling, investing in, and developing a global SDR team successfully. We acknowledge that building out the SDR team over the past 6 months has had bumps, and we are specifically seeking to learn from those who have been there done this while bringing in a senior leader who can be a mentor and positively impact the careers and opportunities of our SDR team. There is much to do with metrics, deliverables, leadership, and culture for sure. Thanks again for your review! We look forward to hiring the new leader soon.
2.0
Feb 24, 2022

Hypergrowth is all that matters

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Deel is nowhere near as good as the reviews here would make you believe. Notice how none of the good ones have much detail. My impression after over a year and lots of asking around other employees / contractors about their thoughts / situation is that they're short 5-star reviews with little thought behind, coming from people without business experience (they may have some work experience, but not business). - Fully remote, flexible time off, people are friendly, and if you ever dealt with painstaking, awful company systems, you'll be happy to know Deel's systems are about as good as it gets. Well-thought-out and they stay out of the way. - If you rate things 5 stars when there's "nothing to complain about," then Deel will likely be enjoyable for you. They go to great lengths to say pretty words to make people feel cared for and like everything they do is right. Taking everything they say at face value and without second thoughts makes you *feel* good about the company and the job. - Having an "I don't care" attitude, will let you have a pretty comfy job (though at the expense of growth inside the company), which is why I'm still staying with them. You will need to perform well without effort to make this work, though. If you're not used to being a top performer with ease or have trouble saying no to people, this point is invalid. - The company culture is love it or hate it. Teams are constantly hyping and congratulating themselves for doing their job. It's like kindergarten in that "Yay! We're the best! You can do it!" type of attitude. People are just "nice." It can come off as an echo chamber and dishonest, so it's up to you if this is a pro or not.

Cons

Hypergrowth is all that matters to Deel right now. Everything else is an afterthought. This affects the company negatively in a number of ways. Most people will ignore this just because they won't get fired over it, so it doesn't matter in their heads: - Little respect for personal time. They'll call you on a free day if they miscalculated the workload that day. This was a bigger issue before, when we would have 300 cases waiting days to get an answer. After mass hires, we now have days when I can watch movies in between cases because of low volume. Expect lay-offs in the future. - Procedures are a mess, and there are changes nearly every day. Sometimes big ones that take half an hour to go through, and with little to no documentation. This means you're often unsure what to do, when you ask nobody is sure either, and if you make a mistake you get punished for it. - Everyone frequently tries to get around our bad procedures and when management notices, the answer is to turn the behavior into a punishable failure rather than improve the flow. - Our product has a constant stream of bugs, recurring issues with the service that have been there since before I joined, and products / services that are released half-finished or with a lot of limitations, resulting in pissed clients and no way to help them. - "Branding" is not about showing our strengths, but rather pretending it's all perfect and there's nothing wrong. People are punished for even SUGGESTING to a client that there might be something wrong with a part of the product. Honesty is discouraged if you want to help customers. - We keep bringing up compliance as a focus, but the legal team is severely inconsistent in their answers. Also, if you give us a 1-star review in TrustPilot we'll bend the rules and throw you a bone, so you change it to a 5. - Deel localizes payments, which means you'll be paid less for doing the same or a better job if you're in what they consider to be a low-cost country, and will never see a high enough salary if you're based in a higher-cost region because the cheaper hires bring the rates down. - Growth inside the company is an illusion. Us cheaper hires get promoted to save money, so everyone feels like growth is possible, but from a career standpoint you could be getting more money for the same work elsewhere. - As an aside, make sure you negotiate your salary. Most people don't, and many are getting less after a promotion than I was getting before being promoted, even through we're from the same region. - Finally, the hyper growth means investors keep demanding more, unreasonable things, so the job gets harder as time goes on, but your pay stays the same because a higher valuation doesn't mean more wealth for employees. Add the recent mass hires and you bet they'll make the job more strict as they eventually need to scale down.

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