Stackline Careers

  • Website www.stackline.com
  • Industry E-Commerce & Retail
  • Locations Seattle, WA
  • Founded 2014
  • Size 51 to 200 employees
  • Salary -

Stackline is the company that provides an all-in-one commerce platform that offers the tools for enterprises to grow their businesses. Stackline is led by a group of e-commerce veterans. To date, Stackline’s technology activates data, automates execution, and optimizes e-commerce marketing performance for the world’s largest organizations.

Stackline Reviews

Rating Score2.7 3 reviews

Ratings by Category

  • 2.7 Career Growth
  • 3.0 Work - Life Balance
  • 2.3 Compensation / Benefits
  • 2.0 Company Culture
  • 2.7 Management
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“Recruiters & HR Beware - Unethical and Illegal”

Verified User Former Employee · k***** · Human Resources - Mar 16, 2022

ProsThe Stackline product is a great one (both the software and services) and, under better leadership, could be positioned to be a powerhouse within the industry. Linked to this are the great people at the company which make the micromanaging leadership almost bearable.

A common reason an individual may be seeking a startup is they are looking for larger scope and autonomy to create, within their specialty - software/projects/process/etc without the already set structure you may find at a larger company. Within the confines of Stackline you can find this but the major caveat is this will come and go as leadership has a core belief they can do anything better than everyone else and refuse to "release the wheel", if you will, to allow individuals to perform and succeed. Instead they rely 100% on total control of all situations.

The benefits, on paper, are "good", but I'll cover the cons for them below.

ConsOne of the most glaring areas of concern is no CFO exists or is going to be hired. In addition, no board of directors is in place to act as a check/balance to the decision making from leadership. Any sort of financial officer who could take care of pay, expenses, raises or report out of quarterly earnings would be welcome by all.

Engineering and Data Science Team
If you are thinking about employment within Stackline I would question their planning and release cycle - what are they working on today and what does their future hold as it relates to work life balance. A major problem here is leadership will over promise to clients and then apply immense pressure to this team to meet demands without insight into what delivery could look like based on current projects or resources needed. The company is now past the point of using the excuse "we are a startup", but still relies on that mantra to mandate control and excuse long hours and constant restructures. This cyclical cycle causes unneeded stress and the same theme of chaos and despair - leadership getting involved, making empty threats and "poking around" within areas they don't necessarily understand, but again, feel they can do better than anyone else. If you are curious about the culture a read through of the Glassdoor reviews should give you a good indicator. I would exercise caution on reading any five-star reviews as these, unfortunately, are fake and created by leadership to offset the accurate representation of the company and how it exists today (EX: Two back to back reviews on 8/25/19 to bury the review from 8/13/19.) When presenting leadership with ideas on how help recruiting and change external perception, recruiting was met with the harsh reality they are not interested in using data to make decisions and believe anyone who has a criticism should leave. Direct from leadership, "No one cares or reads Glassdoor and it's not impacting recruitment. It’s an excuse if you think it is." It’s common theme to ignore feedback and belittle those who speak up. If you are a recruiter preparing to interview or engineer thinking about joining Stackline, outside of who you talk with on the interview loop, it’s suggested you request to talk with a minimum of four other folks from this department in varying roles and ensure it’s not leadership. Press them about their time with the company, what culture has been like, how they are addressing growth and what decision-making looks like linked to future products and their intended release dates. It's one thing for them to post publicly online and state, "We're growing from 65 to 100," but it's fully another when they can't keep talent and the underbelly of this org, which is the absolute backbone of the company, is unhappy.

Channel Operations (CHOPs):
This is the largest part of Stackline's company and is a continual revolving door of top talent. Leadership had expressed a complete lack of respect for all of them and, behind their backs, refers to them as "kids who don't know how well they have it." One of leadership’s most common quotes is, "I've given them all winning lottery tickets and they are still ungrateful." On numerous occasions HR has pitched ideas on how to help the turnover (manager training, hire a Sr. Director to look over CHOPs as the five directors all currently report into the CEO, pause hiring and ID themes for the turn over and address them, restructure teams and resources, etc.) but all would be shot down as they were "not a priority" and “no matter what we do people are going to come and go in that place.” On one occasion leadership stated, “I could replace them all by sourcing for new candidates on my own for one hour a week for a month.” Leadership has stated they have thought about selling off all of CHOPs in favor of resourcing that part of the company externally. Whether they were throwing a tantrum and venting just to vent, as they’re known to do, or this was serious is unknown. The intent of sharing this information is not to simply showcase the negative within the org, but more broadly show the lack of humanity leadership has for the human beings dedicating time to the company vision and mission. HR cannot impact change within culture if leadership is unwilling to change or be open to criticism.

Turnover
During interviews, I asked directly what the turnover was and the response from leadership was since the company’s inception in 2014 Stackline has not lost more than about four employees. I would find out during my first week this was a lie and it was upwards of 25+ across all parts of the company. Linked to this, leadership has stated that all employees who have left are unregretted which, from an HR perspective, is almost a near impossibility just from a number’s standpoint. When pressed on the specifics of an employee’s departure, either past or present, leadership always has an unbelievable or radical story for why it's for the best. "We'd been really working with them on X, but they couldn't perform," or "they just didn't fit in and were causing issues. It was for the best." Always the same. No remorse or learning. Leadership is always quick to point to negatives and share them within the company. Always the individual’s fault and nothing the company could change or learn.

If you are a recruiter and readying yourself for interviews I would press them on their turnover, how do they plan to address it both within CHOPs and the Engineering and Data Science team, what will your exact hiring goals be if you started today, how will they measure your success and finally what is your recruiting budget related to tools you may need to complete your job.

Benefits:
Leadership, during May, requested a full audit of company benefits to be more in line with the top tech companies in Seattle. After a full analysis was completed a full new plan was rolled out which included 20 days of PTO (13 vacation and 7 sick days) for employees to be used as they see fit. Any candidate starting after January of each year would be minus 1 vacation day (8 hours) per month. EX: Starting in March you would be less 2 vacation days, etc. The CEO reviewed and approved this plan and then rolled it out to the company. During July he pulled HR into a conference room insisting too many employees were taking time off and the prorated portion of the plan needs to be changed, which would cause multiple employees to go into a negative balance. When pressed what HR would tell the company on the change his response was for us to lie and tell them there, “is a bug within the HRIS system that tracks this.” In short – unethical.

Regarding the 401k plan this does exist, and you can opt into it during your first paycheck. Pay is managed by a company call Paychex. It was flagged to HR a few employees had opted for a 50/50 split into how their 401k should be applied versus 100% into a single type. These employees would find out that 1) only one account was getting the money invested for the 50/50 split and 2) the missing money from the second account was still being removed from their paycheck. By definition this is embezzlement. Leadership was questioned on why this happened and stated Paychex only allows one type of contribution. When investigated further this was quickly pointed out as not the case and Paychex does allow for multiple types. A contact at Paychex let HR know there was simply more paperwork and an additional cost to allow for multiple contributions leadership did not want to complete.

Growing Offices:
A quick look through their website and you’ll see Stackline has three offices. Seattle, Minneapolis and London. If you are pitched these as a possibility for the future be mindful and push with additional questions. The London office does not exist and the appropriate steps to even conduct business in the EU have not been taken even though HR attempted to assist with this on multiple occasions. What this should more accurately read within their website is they hope to one day expand to London but, again, today have not worked with the appropriate government contacts to employ individuals, conduct business or recruit within the EU. This is an area that, if reported, could impact the future of the company and their ability to even conduct business within the EU. This is a prime example of leadership pushing forward without leaning on the professionals they have hired to assist in their assigned areas of expertise.

Recruiting:
There is a dangerous disconnect on what the company needs and the time it takes to hire talented individuals into engineering roles within one of the most competitive markets in the country. If you are a recruiter looking to interview dig into a couple of areas. The first is you will have no ramp time to build a pipeline or ID themes to overcome recruiting challenges. The expectation is hires should be incoming within the first month – prepare to have a weekly sitdown leadership answering basic recruiter 101 questions. “Did you click on their LinkedIn profile after you emailed them, so they know Stackline is interested?” “Have you tried linking the CEO’s LinkedIn in your email, so they know who he is?” During a six-month period, recruiting was able to hire 13 new hires – 1 FE Engineer, 2 Data Scientists, a TPM and consultants across various teams in addition to multiple BE Engineers and Data Scientist offers. Leadership would later tell recruiting this was failing, and the non-tech hiring was unneeded regardless of what his directors in those areas thought. The second piece I would dig into is what will your exact monthly, quarterly and six-month goals be for engineering and non-tech as today no recruiter exists at the company. Finally, push on the tech versus non-tech hiring and who you will actually be supporting. There are several directors within Business Development and Channel Operations who need immediate support. Leadership will state behind closed doors to forget about their needs, but then within open air praise them for hard work and insist help is on the way. This put recruiting at a major disadvantage as they are continually the middleman with refusal from leadership to sit-down with all of his direct reports to get on the same page for what the company needs, where recruiting priorities are and what can be expected in the coming months.

EEOC is a major problem that leadership does not believe needs to be followed. If you have plans of joining a startup and helping shape the direction of Stackline’s recruiting, I would exercise immense caution as you will not have a seat at the table to provide direction or feedback. Leadership has stated they will take a future audit or fine versus understanding what EEOC rules they need to follow.

LinkedIn and job postings. Leadership runs personal recruiting ads on LinkedIn for jobs that don’t even exist at the company simply to attract applicants. If you’re curious, run a quick search on LinkedIn within their jobs area and compare this to what you find on their careers site. Not only is this a bit unethical, as it is an obvious bait and switch, but leadership has no plans of changing this. In addition, this creates a secondary issue in that the LinkedIn applicants go straight to leadership versus recruiting so from a disposition standpoint some applicants are just deleted from their inbox instead of being appropriately reviewed and dispositioned. Again, this has been flagged to leadership several times and is only met with anger.

Advice to management:
Step back and focus on what being human means. You have individuals giving up days, nights and weekends, but you they are talked to with the most condescending tone. Allow the intelligent hires you’ve made to actually do their jobs without constant micromanaging. If you are an employee reporting into the CEO have some backbone to standup to him and give a voice to those on your team who need your support.

Reasons for ResignationUnethical leadership
Lack of respect
Low pay compared to other companies

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