AcadiumReviews of acadium.com

I‘d rather not offer details.

We used Acadium to try and find an apprentice for our startup. At first I was optimistic but had my reservations. My reservations turned out to be warranted. Pros: I will say that the customer service is generally quick to respond. They also give you some feedback and have a system in place to try to keep the matches "working well." I'll also say that I think they are CLOSE to having a rewarding and winning solution. There are just too many negative aspects to warrant paying for this service IMO. CONS: To start, the level of talent on the platform is very hit or miss. I understand that the objective of this platform is to give apprentices an opportunity to learn, real world experience, resume building, job opportunity etc. But it leads to a lot of candidates who don't really have a very strong motivation to actually do the work. It sounds good in practice but is very difficult in our experience to pair with someone who is actually going to do much. Another gripe of mine is that you can only ever see or get paired with one apprentice at a time. It makes the process very difficult to see who is actively looking and what the prospect pool looks like. To me, I think they should switch the process around. They should have companies reaching out and recruiting the candidates to see if THEY are interested. Only if you are paired with candidate are you billed. Instead, the clock starts on billing and you have to go through the painstaking process of reviewing induvial CVs, and it could take days or weeks to pair with 1. Thirdly, something that is really not apparent and very hard to understand, you are paying for a subscription quarterly in order to access an apprentice. They make it seem like its a one time fee in exchange for 90 days of apprentice. It's NOT. That fee will be billed every quarter regardless of how long you actually have an apprentice. I will accept some blame for not fully understanding this before signing up. That being said, they really need to make this more clear to avoid customer dissatisfaction. I would pay $459 for 90 days of an apprenticeship. I would not pay for $459 for 3 months of trying to make a half ass apprenticeship work, stopping, onboarding another, stopping... etc. If you are looking for an intern or apprentice, I recommend you look elsewhere. The candidate pool is limited and the membership fees pile up regardless of work done. You are likely going to be better of recruiting from schools.

We found the onboarding to be difficult because of time zones, as clearly they need to outsource a majority of their options. And the onboarding time counts against your 12 weeks as well. Then be prepared for an automatic renewal, with less than 7 days notice- and it's non-refundable, so hopefully you love this service! It's a nice idea, but in practice, I think you'll find other virtual assistant services elsewhere more rewarding and flexible, along with remote workers and even AI.

Good communication from Acadium, but a poor experience with the mentor acquisition process (0 for 5 in two months). I signed up in October of 2023 and followed all the steps they (nicely) outlined to set myself up for success. The first match didn't meet my requirements. They quickly re-matched me. The second person didn't have a firm grasp of the English language. They re-matched me. The third person started, and after a week, I received a text that something had come up and they needed to withdraw. I was matched to a fourth, we scheduled a time, and they didn't show. After I followed up twice, they said they had too much going on and couldn't take on an apprentice role. I met with my fifth match and quickly learned they wanted to learn about digital marketing but weren't interested in performing research to work on my project. Today I reached out to the 6th match to confirm our time, and they said they weren't feeling well and needed to reschedule. Humans get sick, and they have things come up however the 10+ hours I have spent organizing and preparing for conversations that never occurred is unfortunate. I reached out to customer support to ask for a phone call to discuss my concerns and was told they are a small team and cannot manage that. From a customer experience standpoint, there is a big opp here for Acadium. Not getting anything other than "we are happy to rematch you if you'd like" from their team after six failed launches is a bummer and not the way I believe any company actually intends to show up. Nonetheless, that is how my experience shook out.

It was a rocky start from the beginning. Very disorganized and recommending interns that didn’t really fit the requirements. The mobile app was very buggy, making it nearly unusable. Even the webapp chat was subpar. There was also an option to select which countries/regions that interns would be filtered by and a “$200 credit” was offered if interns from outside those areas was matched. This, I later found out like many of their promises, was a lie. Besides nearly 30 interns starting and quitting the next day (therefor not properly vetted) they also decided to discontinue the account credit and not pay out any past credits earned. With

From our experience, 80% of the apprentices will not complete the job. It's also very annoying that they limit the apprentice slots, tasks, and other aspects of their website. So, you have to wait a few weeks to receive a rejection and start over as opposed to having several "positions" open and making more use of your time.

A platform that requires quite a bit of luck to get value from. Generally ok if you can put in the time required to find the right candidates. 2 stars given because their billing is underhanded. They will sign up you on longer subscriptions to set and forget. No warnings that renewal is coming up and no refunds if you get caught out by a ghost renewal. Who doesn't hate feeling they've been tricked into renewing? It's a no from me.

I was contacted on LinkedIn by an Acadium salesperson, asking if I would be open to hosting an apprentice within my business. I asked one clear and simple question (about the US vs. non-US dispersal of the apprentices in the Acadium program), and twice my question was dodged by Acadium in our digital chat. Since this gave off a red flag that (for whatever reason) this question couldn't be answered before a "15-minute phone call", I halted our engagement. Please don't come at me like a used car salesman who isn't willing to be honest about your product.