What is Glassdoor Telling Us about the Cannabis Industry

What is Glassdoor Telling Us about the Cannabis industry?

cannabis glassdoor jobs

If you are not familiar with the explosive job growth going on in the cannabis space, you can check out our cannabis job board here and see that jobs are getting posted weekly. Those are jobs that are almost exclusively in legal marijuana states, so imagine the posting when the Federal law is changed. Early estimates have the cannabis industry creating about 250,000 jobs in the US right now and over 1 million jobs will be created when the Federal law is changed.

But what is it like working at a cannabis company?

We did a review on Glassdoor, the employee review job site that also lists current job openings at companies. Glassdoor prides itself on being 100% transparent and all employee reviews are legit and stay up so that companies can’t get bad reviews removed or altered. Companies are allowed to respond to negative review, in a similar way Yelp allows restaurants and businesses to answer questions and explain any negative feedback.

Here are some general themes for cannabis company reviews on Glassdoor.

Funding matters – The job space stress factor, such as worry and anxiety, is super high at a start up, no pun intended. If your company has done a funding round or has good working capital, it seems that the anxiety of “will I still be here next week” goes down and creates a better work environment. That is not to say all companies that are well funded have stellar reviews, but it sure helps to know that you are getting a paycheck in the future and can worry about your work assignments instead of looking for a new job.

Touching the flower companies tend to have a higher employee satisfaction then non-touching the flower. This is a bit of generality as many factors can play into a review such as a bad boss, drive time, team you are working with, etc, but in general, if you are touching the flower and working with the plant, you tend to have a higher job satisfaction. That is not to say dispensaries don’t have high turnovers at the budtender level, but when you get to the management levels, rating improve with touching the flower companies.

Media companies seem to be a mixed bag – Building up a media company in this space is tough and depending on if your company has decent reviews, the rating can jump all over the place. For example, Weedmaps and Leafly, two well-funded companies with a long history have high ratings, whereas startups like Herb are having start-up growing pains. Creating revenue from media traffic is tough in this space and with Facebook and Google (Medic Update) cutting back on cannabis sites’ reach and traffic, the advertising/branding model is a tough go right now. Also, many brands cannot ship their product across a state line, so they may only be interested in hyper-focused campaigns, not national blasts by social media and email.

Just like any industry, having a good boss and good team matters – Cannabis companies are no different than other companies when it comes to having a good boss or being part of a good team. The reviews on Glassdoor contain a section saying “Would you recommend this CEO” and like most companies, the review are higher when the employee likes his or her boss. Team was also important in cannabis, like in non-cannabis companies, and many reviews went higher or lower based on terms like “great team” or “hated my team”.

Are all the reviews perfect on Glassdoor? No, like any review or complaint site, people are generally motived to post a negative review when they are mad, or they feel they have been wronged in some way. They want to make their NEGATIVE experience public to get back for the negative experience. It is not as often that people go on and just leave positive reviews because they feel like it. It takes time and energy out of their day, so the general theme is 70/30 ratio on negative to positive ratios on public review sites. When people are angry, they write, when people are happy, they go about their way unless they had a truly remarkable experience or are asked to leave a review.

It will be fascinating to watch how the reviews and averages even out as more and more people get hired in the cannabis space and companies get more and more funding. Remember, you will never please everyone, all the time, but at least you can create a healthy work environment and create meaningful jobs for people that promote a healing and healthy plant.

Check for open cannabis jobs on the new job board, click here!