Pros
The Penn Plaza location is easy to access via the subway, and the new office as of 2018 is a huge upgrade to the previous dump. The technology is decent – the post-discharge follow up calls are effective at reducing readmissions while the digital rounding is table stakes adequate.
Cons
The negative vibes at Cipher begin at the top – the culture is terrible. Don’t be fooled by the recent slew of fake reviews (3 glowing reviews on June 10th anyone?), nobody is happy at Cipher. The CRO is a passive aggressive slave to JMI, the private equity group that dumped nearly $40M into Cipher in 2018 and as a result has shifted the culture to pandering to JMI whims. What was formerly a decent opportunity to penetrate the patient engagement market has turned into a bevy of miniscule territories accompanied by unrealistic expectations. There isn’t a single person making their number (apart from 1-2 ‘favored nations,’ which I’ll revisit in a moment), as massive hiring (and most recently firing) has slashed normal territory size into 1-2 state regions, with 15 state quotas. As a result, nobody is making any money and everyone is living in fear. Leadership urges the sales team to hound prospects even if the sales team has been told the timing isn’t appropriate by prospects – at best nothing happens, and at worst people create negative associations with Cipher (and your name). There are a few ‘legacy’ sales reps that are handed plum territories; interesting how one’s territory is comprised of only community hospitals while those that should have landed under one’s purview are with other folks. If you only trust certain people to manage deals, why are you on a massive hiring spree? Do you think it’s motivating to the staff to show blatant favoritism? One of the junior legacy favored reps was recently promoted into a leadership role and he promptly fired the majority of his team shortly after flying everyone in for a quarterly business review! Great use of company funds and way to keep morale high! Unsurprisingly, the turnover at Cipher has been through the roof, both voluntary and involuntary. There are countless ‘today is my last day at Cipher’ e-mails in which relieved individuals write phony comments about how much they’ve loved their time at Cipher and would like to remain in touch. These of course are better than the ‘so and so is no longer with Cipher, we thank them for their contributions.’ Do you? Folks are sometimes put on performance plans (often after working at the company for less than 3 months – is that on the employee or on the company for poor training?), and are sometimes let go based upon knee jerk reactions by the CRO and his cronies. The Chief People Officer, not to be outdone in phoniness, will be quick to respond to Glassdoor comments with generic fluff about how great Cipher is; she may have even stopped doing this as it is likely a full-time job at this point. Cipher has a culture of overworking and underappreciating people, a testament to the extremely inexperienced leadership.
