Run Baby Run - Talent Acquisition Manager Glovo Employee Review

Micromanagement: The level of micromanagement becomes suffocating. You feel it breathing down your neck every single second, but as a manager, you are also forced to apply it to your direct reports. Any sign of trust in your team, or not spying on their work, will be taken as a weakness or a “lack of hands-on approach.” This methodology completely distances you from what truly matters as a leader. Snitching and Escalation Culture: Instead of resolving any minor conflict or disagreement directly between the people involved, an escalation culture is heavily encouraged. The person who "escalates" someone else wins points with leadership for setting a “high bar.” The amount of hours I spent managing escalations over issues that any functional adult in another company would handle just by talking face-to-face is ridiculous. Bad Vibes: Consistently, you see that the people most likely to thrive in this organization are those who mistake assertiveness for aggression. They address their peers (and especially those below them) in a despotic, passive-aggressive manner, with a total lack of empathy. This creates a constant fear of failure, which completely paralyzes professionals who would otherwise be superstars. However, that exact same profile tends to turn into flattery and servility toward those above them, creating a clientelist network of people who are there because they owe each other favors. Push-back does not exist upward, only downward, forming a company of single-minded thought where everyone just tries to echo the leader. Lack of a Clear TA Strategy: Continuous, senseless shifts in direction. They went from an ultra-low-cost strategy (where the workload had to be carried almost entirely by interns) to the exact opposite strategy, burning money pointlessly giving transactional boring work to senior & strategic recruiters who are bored and dissatisfied after weeks. When things start to fail, the blame is placed on the recruiters. When you fire them and hire more senior ones by spending more money, the doubts shift to the managers. Finally, when you get rid of them, they end up axing the Head of turn, only to start the cycle all over again. The blame is never placed on the senior leaders who initiated a new (and failed) strategy every 12–15 months. Lack of Local Market Appeal Disguised as Diversity: For years now, almost no one in Barcelona with a decent CV wants to work for Glovo. This is why we have to source professionals from other countries and continents for roles otherwise easy to find locally, despite the added costs and onboarding delays. This becomes a particularly poor strategy when you sponsor someone’s work permit, wait 4 months for them to arrive, and within 6 months you’ve burned them out and they leave on their own (or you fire them). This results in a very diverse base of Individual Contributors, but that diversity vanishes at higher levels, where the only people who grow share a very specific demographic profile similar to the leaders (local, from a certain private university in Barcelona, and if you are a supernumerario, even better). Sometimes, the English level at the leadership level is lower than among the juniors on the team. Horrible Atmosphere, Constant Burnout: The environment is so toxic that the very people who are supposed to fight it spend their time putting up signs using the company’s corporate font, mocking the burnout that their own culture causes (“Crying Designated Area, Please Limit The Episodes to 15 Minutes”). And meanwhile, you have to put on a brave face and laugh along, knowing that half of my colleagues were crying in the bathroom (because honestly, nobody dared to actually use the crying corner). The smiles on LinkedIn posts are tears in private. The atmosphere is so bad that practically not a single person who leaves the company ever tries to come back, which is shocking in a relatively small market. For the 3 or 4 people they’ve managed to hire back (out of thousands), they’ve launched social media campaigns bragging about being able to bring back a stray lamb. In any given month at Glovo, I have seen more burnout victims than in 10 years of my career, with stress levels visibly affecting employees' physical health and an alarming rate of medical leaves (the local CAP clinics in Barcelona know them by heart). If you don't treat people well out of empathy or decency, at least do it because you are burning money paying for sick leaves. Good Management = 0 Empathy: If you are a manager and your team feels that you treat them with empathy, trust, or respect, or if you dedicate time to developing their skills, you are doing it wrong. The team needs to fear you. The moment a team gets a good score on the “anonymous” satisfaction survey, all suspicions turn toward the manager, who is accused of being soft, weak, or lacking ambition. Leadership can only conceive that a team is happy because the manager isn't demanding enough; they naturally assume everyone is lazy unless they are kept under the whip. If you want to grow here, be prepared to sacrifice any shred of decency and abandon your values and principles. You Are Never Good Enough: And if you are a manager, you better make sure your team knows that they aren’t good enough either. And it’s not about the work or the results: the level of criticism and intimidation is designed to make people doubt their own capabilities and potential. Every mistake is just an opportunity to remind someone that they aren't worth enough. Hard Work Beats Good Results: Closely related to the previous point, those who give the impression of working long and grueling hours are the ones who get promoted. If someone achieves great results but leaves before 7 PM or works with a smile, it is assumed they are a bad employee and their goals were too easy. Results matter very little compared to self-exploitation, and harmful, self-destructive behaviors are publicly praised. On one occasion, a leader made me walk around the floor at 7:30 PM just to show me how other teams had a higher percentage of people still warming their seats, while 50% of my team had already gone home (most likely to keep working from home anyway). Exploitation: You will often read that people work 60 hours a week (which is the magic number recruiters were asked to mention in interviews), but honestly, that is far from the main problem, which is why I leave it for last. There are plenty of companies where people work hard but love what they do. In fact, the few people left from before 2023 (the year everything changed) always tell me how much they loved their jobs until 2022, even though they worked even harder back then. Plus, in other companies, you feel you are working hard to grow, learn, and get promoted... here, it’s simply so you don’t get fired. At Glovo, at least in the People department, I don’t know a single person who enjoys their job and isn't actively looking for a new one. Low-Impact Work at a Responsibility Level: As a recruiter, almost everything you are tasked with will be hyper-transactional. If you have more than 5 years of experience (or 1–2 years in a good company), you are not going to learn absolutely anything. You will spend your time doing high-volume hiring with inexperienced hiring managers who hold all the power in the relationship. Recruiters are viewed as a subordinate, subservient figure to PPs and HMs, rather than as a true talent advisor. Oh, and on top of that, they pay poorly (yet they demand from you as if they were Google).