Juul’s troublesome image may hinder quest for workers
Even as Juul Labs faces scrutiny from U.S. regulators, the electronic cigarette company is embarking on a worldwide hiring spree, seeking to fill hundreds of jobs.
But Juul’s troubled image — public health experts fear its popular vaporizer and flavored nicotine pods are creating a new generation of addicted teens — doesn’t sit well with some tech workers who’ve been contacted by recruiters about working there. Some Juul employees have quit over the same concern.
Executives at the San Francisco company, which has 70 percent of the electronic cigarette market, have said their intention is to help adult smokers transition from traditional tobacco cigarettes to less-toxic e-cigarettes. But Juul’s products caught fire among teens with flavors
such as mint, mango and creme. Public health researchers say the flavors are drawing young people who otherwise wouldn’t have started smoking cigarettes to nicotine, which is highly addictive.
Juul says retention rates have stayed strong throughout the year. The company, which is private, employs 1,110 people, more than five times the roughly 200 workers it had at the beginning of the year, according to a Juul spokesman. An average of 100 to 120 new people join each month. Juul has more than 300 immediate openings in San Francisco, New York, Tel Aviv, Canada, Singapore, London, Brussels and elsewhere, according to listings posted over the last month on the jobs site LinkedIn.
Juul executives say they are trying to address the problem of teen addiction through ageverification protocols. But that’s not enough for some potential recruits.
“I would probably never work for them,” said Emily Kager, an engineer at a major tech company in San Francisco. “I think your work should reflect your morals, and I wouldn’t want to work for a company that knowingly targets youth with their marketing of an addictive product of unknown safety that’s been investigated by the FDA.”
Kager was contacted in September by a recruiter through LinkedIn who was reaching out on behalf of several companies, including Juul. Kager says she did not respond.
Conversations among people who recently considered job opportunities at Juul reveal a debate over working for a company whose real-world impact has strayed from its stated mission. On the anonymous chat app Blind, one user cited no moral objections working for Juul because vaping helped the person quit smoking; another equated working for a vaping company to giving drugs to children.
Juul’s aggressive expansion plans offer one window into a young company at a critical juncture. Juul is racing to remake its public image and negotiate with regulators over a potential crackdown on its most lucrative products — all while maintaining the day-today operations of a fast-growing business with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.
The job listings include positions for engineers, accountants, brand managers, sales representatives and chemists. They also include public policy and government affairs specialists — who typically lobby officials and regulators at the local, state and federal levels — in San Francisco, London, Brussels and New York. Companies often make such hires in preparation for navigating regulatory hurdles or shaping legislation they anticipate will impact their business in local markets. Juul recently began selling vaporizers and pods in England and Israel; in Israel, it had to lower the nicotine content of the pods after the country’s high court banned high levels of the drug in e-cigarettes.
“With Juul Labs’ tremendous growth, we are focused on building our teams across all functions both in the U.S. and overseas ... as we work to improve the lives of the world’s 1 billion smokers and to combat underage use so we keep Juul out of the hands of young people,” a Juul spokesman said in a written statement.
Juul has already beefed up its presence in Washington, where it’s facing its most immediate threat. In September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Juul and several other e-cigarette companies a 60-day deadline to submit a plan to stop selling e-cigarettes to minors. An FDA spokesman declined to share details about the status of the investigation. In a written statement, Juul CEO Kevin Burns said the company has had a “constructive and transparent dialogue” with FDA officials about preventing underage use.
One of Juul’s job listings is for an FDA regulatory attorney, based in San Francisco.
Juul nearly tripled its lobbying spending over the past year from $120,000 to $330,000, according to federal lobbying records. The company, which is valued at $15 billion and raised $650 million as of July, has recruited several Washington insiders well versed in crisis communications and health policy. This month, Josh Raffel, a former White House communications official close to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, joined as a Juul spokesman. In April, Jim Esquea, a former assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama, became Juul’s federal affairs director.
Juul, which is headquartered in the Dogpatch neighborhood, recently looked into a potential lease at Uptown Station, the largest vacant office building in Oakland. The space was previously owned by Uber, which planned to have 3,000 employees there before abandoning plans to create an East Bay office. Juul decided not to lease there but is continuing to look for additional office space in the Bay Area.
A Stanford University study released Friday found that high school seniors and recent graduates who use Juul are more addicted to the product than those who use other ecigarettes. The finding raises concerns about higher rates of addiction among Juul users.
Chronicle staff writer Roland Li contributed to this report.