Pros
Great colleagues (But who are all suffering in there with you now and utterly overworked, 80% who are probably clinically depressed and anxious, on the brink of mental breakdown and only hanging on to their jobs until the pandemic is over so they can pay their bills)
Cons
Revolut is currently akin to Hunger Games where as an employee, you find yourself wondering and hoping that the ‘odds will be with you’. It currently doesn’t matter if you are a high performing individual who values human decency, be prepared to have your head on the guillotine. Yes. Revolut currently reminds me of medieval Europe, with the CEO wielding the axe, and you just waiting for when your name will be called up and your head to be on the chopping board in the middle of a pandemic. A description as above merits a full explanation and a bit of history. As someone who has been with Revolut almost two years, I think I have a good overview and insights to this whole traumatic debacle of a company. Yes, the horror stories of Revolut you read in the media and the reviews you see here are all true. Being female, I knew that joining Revolut was going to be tough. I didn’t realise it was going to be hell. In late 2018 to early 2019, the culture was already cut throat. If you were female and didn’t break down and cry that month, that was a great month for you. I have had female colleagues who cried every day the first week they joined. Me myself? There were so many times I found myself crying in the office toilets, something I have never done in my career before. I had expletives yelled at me in public. I was told my work was stupid or dumb as ...... In Feb 2019, the first Wired article broke out and that hit the company badly. Customers were threatening to cut up their cards and media backlash was spiraling. The CEO realised he had to do something. The people team was expanded, and they tried to put in place better processes and improve culture overall. It was a great effort by those involved but with complete lack of buy-in from the CEO and his right-hand man. In the meantime, Revolut was still in its hyper-growth mentality. All leads were pressured to hire and grow headcount. Heads of departments were told by the CEO that if they didn’t spend 50% of their time on hiring, they were not doing their jobs. As the second half of the 2019 went by, the company started to become bloated and many of the newer joiners were starting to get more complacent (by complacent, I mean leaving at 5pm-6pm which is a big no-no). Then, funding round came. With the IPO failures of both Uber and Wework, investors were now hyper-obsessed with profitability. Gone were the days where success of a startup was by their number of users. Suddenly, Revolut found itself being scrutinised left right center on how they would actually turn a profit. The game was changing. Back from vacation in Jan 2020, the CEO decided to crack his whip and get the complacent company in shape. Everyone who was underperforming were fired without warnings. I would call that the first wave of the culling. Performance reviews were changes from every 6 months to every 3. Suddenly, you only had 3 months to hit your KPIs. New joiners were told on their first day they joined that HR’s KPI was to ensure there were no underperformers (ie, you don’t hit your KPIs, you’re fired.) The second culling came after the first quarter, with yet more heads being axed if they were not performing. And then the pandemic got under way. The company was desperate to cut its headcount and so they started targeting people who were performing but were not directly helping the company make money. I would say that hundreds across the company got axed including a huge amount from the London headquarters. Not all made it to the official number of redundancies which was at 60+ because the company was obsessed with trying to downplay it’s official numbers so to look better compared to Monzo and Starling. Many people were forced to resign, or were told they were being let go for “underperformance.” As in the UK if your tenure is below 2 years, you are not entitled to get due process for your firing for underperformance, the company exploited this legal loophole to fire many people. There were many international employees, many who upended their lives, suddenly finding themselves thrown out on the streets by Revolut without a job, barely anytime left on their visas and virtually no flights back home to their home countries IN THE MIDDLE OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. Revolut expected their employees to give their all to the company and demanded that, yet had no qualms deserting these very people they demanded loyalty from during the pandemic. Those left in Revolut now suddenly found themselves having to take on the the jobs and KPIs of the people fired along with their crazy amount, and to achieve them or be fired themselves. Heads and team leads, who would rather resign, are so fearful that if they leave, there would be no one to protect their team, are working themselves to death because they are told if their team does not achieve the team KPI, headcount will be cut. The CEO has basically used the pandemic to drive fear within the employees and hold their livelihoods and feed themselves and family at ransom, in exchange for working conditions bordering ghastly human exploitation. Please avoid like plague. Don't leave a cushy secure job now only to join Revolut and then be fired within 2/3 months (without probation not renewed). Their modus operandi for firing you will be giving you the excuse you 'underperformed', and then you're left stranded in the middle of a pandemic with no job. [True story: has happened to countless colleagues who left good jobs only to be forced out of Revolut 3 months in.]
