Compare The Market was a really fantastic company to work for under the previous board, I had no reason to ever want to leave and worked there for many years. You could forgive the tight reins of the parent company BGL because the culture was brilliant and it was a lot of fun. The new CEO arrived and all but one of the board jumped ship and new appointments were made. Over the last six months, they have irreversibly trashed the culture and made it an awful place that could not be more different. The photos on here are very very old.
CEO (ex-Test & Trace) looks set to destroy the company. A very clever smiling villain will preach about maintaining an excellent culture that he never experienced (appointed during lockdown) while simultaneously allowing it to be totally and irreversibly destroyed.
Operating costs are being driven down and down while profits are still high. Presumably, a sale is inbound soon. If you work in tech, expect your job to move to the Belarus office where wages are significantly lower.
Some senior managers are very unprofessional and this is accepted as being OK, they will berate lower grade staff publically and show absolutely no leadership skills whatsoever. Ask about the gender balance in Tech at the moment, relive the 1950s.
The family feel which existed through the company before is gone, and only really continues inside some individual teams. The meerkats being in our blood and our being our currency is a thing of the past. Except to be addressed by The Board™ if you are lucky, otherwise it will be one of the hand wringing minions who seem to be multiplying at an alarming rate.
Tech claims to be Agile but isn't really as too many red-tape bottlenecks exist for fast and continuous delivery. FCA regulations enforce much of this but some processes are just painful. Without asking anyone, senior management decides Tech is "too Agile" so get a consultancy in to presumably make us just the right amount of Agile.
Money is spent appointing a consultant agency to advise CTM how to spend less money on consultant agencies.
You might be able to work from home, you might not, CEO says one thing, CTO says another, HR says another. All smoke and mirrors. If you question it expect to have the boys round, your disappearance quickly papered over and your reputation torn down as a warning to others.
Contracts only work one way. Expect to receive threats about breaching your end of the bargain while they break theirs. Wrongful dismissal cases are cheap and cheerful for a multi million pound company. Things shouldn't be this way.
Senior management often try and compare CTM with Google, Apple, and Spotify (apparently they came to us for advice).
Expect groundhog day if you are there long enough. New business ideas rarely get anywhere, they are simply chopped up, rehashed and presented as the next great thing by the latest fall guy every couple of years.
Suddenly closed down the office permanently with no warning in the middle of the pandemic, then wanted everyone back in a shared office a fraction of the size. Total disregard for that being CTMs home. Discussed on the side alongside (unrelated) redundancies and so naturally worried staff.
The company has remained extremely profitable throughout, no bonus though because you should "think yourself lucky you have a job". Salary is acceptable for Peterborough, but £20-40k less than market averages. Everyone who left recently got a significant pay jump.
Attitude to staff retention is "the grass isn't always greener, you'll be back".
