A Joke of a Company
Pros
-Decent pay for my area, to their credit they did seem to take experience into account and were willing to do some negotiation. -Flexible schedule (sometimes). No weekend work, and projects were able to be scheduled at one's own discretion and rearranged on the fly
Cons
-Wildly inconsistent schedule, far beyond the expectations set by recruiters/managers. You are likely to never know how much work you'll be doing more than a week ahead of time, and even then you might not even get all of your workload assigned until mid-way through the week, destroying whatever flexibility you might have had. -Abysmal communication. Good luck getting in touch when something isn't directly needed from you. The company is quick to shower you with praise when you're helping to clean up their messes, but is virtually silent when all is well but you need their assistance. They will blow up your phone/email when projects are having issues, but if you need them, you will often go completely unheard. -Upper management appears to have no idea what it's doing. They've been in business for years, yet have to scramble to make sure their full time employees have enough hours, and they do this by pulling work from part-timers with virtually no prior notice. On three separate occasions, I had half my workload disappear from my schedule with no communication from either my manager or the people above them. Turns out this was work given to full time employees because their hours were below the minimum necessary to keep their full time status. "Full time" is also defined as EXACTLY 40 hours, meaning this work would be given to them and then they would be pressured to work fast so as to avoid charging overtime. Because they consistently ignored obvious patterns in the workflow, and never seemed to have a grasp of anything more than two weeks in advance, it was consistently the case that full time workers in my area were pulling between 55 and 60 hours, while part timers got less than 10. Again, this is with NO communication, the work was just gone and the most I ever got was "sorry for the inconvenience". -A necessarily antagonistic relationship. The relationship between these vendors and the stores they service is one that is always strained - the stores contracting with them would, if they could, get rid of them, and so work to undermine the ability for them to meet the promises made in their contracts. Projects would be scheduled too early, meaning materials had yet to arrive at stores to complete, and so it was often the case that again the flexible schedule was destroyed because now the entire 40+ hour week is crammed into the last three days (because the expectation was to get it all done that week). Many 4 and 5-day projects would come on thursdays or fridays, making it even more difficult because we weren't allowed to work at the stores over the weekend. -Communication, again. Between managers there appeared to be no effort to inform new managers as to how their areas were arranged and who was employed within them. I had three different managers in a six month period, and virtually no information was shared from the departing manager, meaning I had to convince one of them of my actual position, and that the work assigned to me was actually mine. -Accountability is basically non-existent. At least once a week I was made to do projects other reps had either failed to do or did incorrectly, and no effort was made to hold these reps accountable for what they were doing. I traveled to three other cities in order to make up for extremely bad hiring decisions, and because it takes MONTHS for them to be found out, this meant what should have been months' worth of work was having to be done in a few weeks. Training is worthless and management lacks the resources/time to send proper trainers out to make sure employees are actually able/willing to do the job.