Its taken me a while to write this review, but a part of me truly felt like I needed to warn people who are considering joining this company in the Edmonton office.
As a long time employee, I have seen various periods of turnover come and go. While this is to be expected with any company at the end of the day, this office truly is in a state of turmoil and depression. The amount of turnover we have experienced in Edmonton within this past year truly is staggering, and here is my look into some of the reasons why.
I have worked with many, many talented, bright, experienced employees here, but unfortunately few of them are still there, as they were either pushed out of the door, or put in a position where they were bound to leave to go pursue other opportunities. Intermediate to senior-level resources generally feel undervalued and under-appreciated. These same employees are either severely under-utilized (where their roles are diminished to nothing but a title with no true role) or severely over-utilized (long term employees with the product and process knowledge essentially end up carrying a management dictated workload on their backs and have no choice to wear multiple hats). These overworked employees generally are not thanked for their “above and beyond” level of work.
On top of this unfortunately is the sad realization that employees of this office generally have no career growth opportunities, as management within this office has been continually pushed out and replaced with resources that reside in the same city as the head office. There are many employees within this office that are beyond qualified, and have several years of experience to boot, but they are still sadly over-looked. The management that has been chosen is not all bad, but most have unfortunately not shown the ability, nor the willingness to learn the product we are responsible for, which makes their decisions very uninformed and confusing to the employees expected to carry out the direction that has been chosen for them.
Like most companies, your career path and career path is promoted as something that they support (and looking at the newsletters, this seems to be the case in other offices), but in this office, it certainly is not something that is encouraged and supported. On countless times, employees have been blocked from switching positions and given no hope (often told if they are unhappy with their position, they should resign). While it is understandable that management has to ensure that they keep enough resources in each department, with the massive amount of turnover that this office has experienced, no effort has been made to replace these resources. We are continually told that management is trying their hardest to hire, but in the midst of a several month period (which is still continuing) where we experienced many significant losses in the development department, there are ZERO postings on this very site Glassdoor, on Monster, or any of the other various popular job sites as of the date of this writing. If it truly was a priority to replace these resources, Sciquest would be on one of these sites. Currently nobody out there knows you are hiring.
Feedback has been given countless times to management by various senior level resources and other well respected employees (former management), but the feedback is generally discarded, and no adjustments are made. When it comes down to it, employees generally lose their motivation to get the job done, as they are essentially ordered to accomplish a goal that is completely unrealistic and unattainable with the lack of resources. Simply put, its hard to win, when you are continually set up to fail by your leaders.
With this situation laid out, where employees with great potential can never accomplish goals, and are shown that there is nowhere for them to go, it is absolutely no surprise that they choose to go elsewhere so that they can accomplish what they have personally set out to do and have great careers.
Management, while generally friendly, have undoubtedly failed to lead the employees of this office. While many proposals for improvement have been presented, no positive changes have been made that I can think of. While management is quick to call meetings at various times to talk about low company morale, action items taken away are never actually actioned upon. When these items are brought up at a later date, they are generally shoved aside and discarded leaving us to believe that the employees voice is simply just not being heard, or taken seriously.
Decisions that are in fact made are done without any sensitivity or regard to the people who work there. Even some decisions that seem obvious to offend the employees are made on a constant basis, and do not seem very well thought-out.
As mentioned earlier, it is extremely difficult to write this review, as there are still some very talented resources who still remain here. If you are a Junior resource looking to get in the door and gain some experience, there certainly is a lot of value and a lot to learn. It is just a shame that the company generally does not hire employees who have no experience. In my opinion, if you are someone with experience, there is absolutely nothing to gain from employment here unless you are comfortable in staying in the same role for the entire duration of your employment here.
While difficult to write, I did my best to write this review as professionally as I possibly could so that it is not thrown in the pile of “the angry bitter ex-employee who wants to ruffle feathers on his/her way out”. While I have moved on from SciQuest, I still do communicate with people still employed here and it truly is a shame. I just wanted to give people considering SciQuest Canada a cold, hard, but completely honest look at how things are here.
What once was a "fun" but productive office, now lacks any sort of positive culture or set of values. It feels like the leaders from Edmonton all the way up to the head office have given up on the employees. With this realization, it truly is no surprise that the people have also given up on this office and their leaders, and will continue to do so at a staggering rate until some serious changes are made.
