I came in broke and left broker — emotionally and financially.
This company genuinely does not prioritise its employees. While they’ll go above and beyond to keep practitioners happy and hit sales targets, the same energy is never extended to the people actually keeping the business running. There’s no meaningful investment in talent unless they’re hiring a new C-suite director or VP from some big-name company like Deliveroo, or Farfetch.
Bonuses? Only if you're an account manager, and even then they’re based on impossible commission targets. There’s no real recognition, no clear growth path — just stress, burnout, and the occasional “thanks” in Slack while you keep the business afloat with outdated workstreams.
The 9-to-6 schedule is bad enough, but let’s be real it’s often longer. And even worse, working hours aren’t clearly communicated to either our B2B clients (practitioners and clinicians) or B2C ( the prac's customers). Why? Because sales always come first. We purposely keep our hours vague even though they’re easy to find online in case someone has a “valuable” sales query at 8 PM. And of course, the people who messaged in are wondering why they are not being responded to.
Unless you're in management, team lead and up, career progression is near impossible, especially if you want to be an individual coordinator. You can exceed expectations and still be told there’s “room for growth,” usually by someone earning triple your salary while handing off their own responsibilities to you. “Think about how we can adapt workflows” and “operationalise more tasks” — translation: please do my job too, but for less.
Everything is “urgent,” all the time. Practitioners constantly threaten to leave (spoiler: they rarely do unless they aren’t really using the platform). While the skincare recommendations are supposedly science-backed, the actual knowledge is often cobbled together by overworked junior employees relying on TikTok, Google, or — ironically — ChatGPT. It's hard to take the "expert-led" message seriously when internal training is inconsistent at best.
The company’s mission and proposition are actually good, I still believe in the core idea. But the execution is deeply flawed, if saw who manual everything used to be, you would cry. They love to throw around words like “honesty” and “transparency,” but those values vanish when it comes to career development, compensation, and feedback. Loyalty is expected. Appreciation? Not so much.
Salary reviews were honestly the most demoralising part of the job. I can’t think of a single one that wasn’t painfully awkward. My manager and I both knew the raise was disappointing, but there’s nothing she could say, and I was just counting down the minutes so I could cry in peace. There’s no explanation, no negotiation, and definitely no plan for how to grow your salary. You’re handed a number well below market rate and expected to be grateful. “We’re so delighted you’ll continue living paycheque to paycheque.”
One last thing, the quarterly team “get-togethers.” You still work most of the day, sit through a few skincare talks in the afternoon, and then spend the next day scrambling because there’s no breathing room in this job. We couldn’t even get one proper day to connect or recharge because, frankly, the CEO loves money too much to let the company slow down for even a few hours. The only benefit is going and realising everyone feels the same as you and knowing you are not alone.
This experience taught me a lot — mostly what to never tolerate again. However I think once you work at GetHarley, you can work anywhere.
